The Bisti

The Bisti Wilderness

Easter Sunday

the view out the bedroom window at Red Rcok

 Leaving Arizona, we found the Red Rock Campground. It is a gem of a park on the Navajo Reservation. Heading east of Gallup on Route 66 or I-40, take Highway 566 and the park is just on the left. A towering cliff of sandstone frames the campsites. We left Red Rock Easter Sunday afternoon to head deeper into the Navajo Reservation. I think the universe was very specific in having us camp out on the reservation at a place with a church rock.

Sitka and I wandered up and down the cliffs in silence of a perfect spring morning, letting Gerard sleep in before breaking camp and heading north about 60 miles. We were given directions through a number of rez roads …a short cut  to New Mexico's badlands. Being in Navajo country is spectacularly beautiful

The Bisti.. pronounced bis-tie needs a blog post all to itself. Gerard likens it to walking into a Salvador Dali painting.  Difficult to believe we haven't been abducted by aliens. Why has this one place on earth worn into these spires and hoodoos? It has to be a geologists dream.

Once we arrived, we set up camp...just out there no real campground as it is BLM (Bureau of Land Management Land). We set off late in the afternoon to descend into an eerie, alien world of tawny desert, stunning rock formations, towering hoodoos and fairy chimneys, fossils and petrified wood. The otherworldly landscape is something I suspect I will not see the likes of again.

The unusual -- and ever-changing -- scenery is a product of time and the natural elements. The area that includes the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness was once a river delta that lay just to the west of the shore of an ancient sea, the Western Interior Seaway, which covered much of New Mexico 70 million years ago. 

The water slowly receded and eventually disappeared, leaving behind a 1,400-foot-thick layer of jumbled sandstone, mudstone, shale, and coal that lay undisturbed for 50 million years. Then, 6,000 years ago, the last ice age receded, exposing fossils and eroding the rock into the fantastic hoodoos you see today, according to the University of Montana's Wilderness.net.

 

The second morning, we set out at daybreak. I am glad I read that it is best to take photos early or late in the day. Mid day sun would just wash out the definition within the photo. It was a walk I won't soon forget. We covered only about 6 miles. It is a place you could walk forever and never see it all.

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.