Places
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Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness
The Bisti/De-Na-Zin is a small wilderness area with two separate
sections in northwest New Mexico south of Farmington. The
smaller Bisti section is more well-known due to the hoodoos, mushroom cap rocks and other unusual rock formations. I've only
done one short hike there after spending a couple hours in the De-
Na-Zin section after backpacking a short distance into there. You
can camp on BLM land near the parking lot on the west side of the
wilderness next to highway 371. It's a fascinating place and a good
place to photograph in. I got this photograph near the west side of
the area where the unusual rock formations start. The long pointed
finger of rock near the upper center of the photo may be the most
unusual rock formation I've seen. It makes me imagine a witch's
finger in a production of Macbeth or the Wizard of Oz.
Angel Peak Badlands
About 15 miles southeast of Bloomfield, NM there's a badlands
area around Kutz Canyon and Angel Peak, a sandstone rock
formation sticking up from an eroded mesa in the distance, with
a table top mesa behind it. A half mile gravel road takes you to
an observation point with this view. Kutz Canyon is a larger
canyon to the west that according to an excellent1995 guidebook
by Mike Hill titled Guide to the Hiking Areas of New Mexico has
a road leading into it from the west. You can walk down a wide
trail more like a road that looks like it probably leads into this
smaller canyon. It's a forbidding place but scenic.
Mesa Verde
A photograph of Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in
North America, though "great houses" built on canyon
floors such as Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon are much
larger. Mesa Verde has 600 cliff dwellings and 5,000 ruins
over 52,000 acres. It's the largest archaeological preserve
in the US. Cliff Palace was built and occupied between
1190 and 1260 CE, but was abandoned before 1300,
likely due to drought. Mesa Verde is a World Heritage Site.
Most of the mesa lies above 7,000 ft with the highest point
reaching 8427 ft. It's almost entirely covered in forest.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, UT
Grand Staircase-Escalante NM was established in 1996 in southern Utah by President Bill Clinton with 1.7 million acres, later expanded to almost 1.9
million acres. It's a very remote area of the West, the last territory in the lower
48 states to be mapped. The Grand Staircase is a series of five long cliffs
dropping from 8,000 feet at Bryce Canyon National Park to the Grand Canyon.
East of the Grand Staircase is the Escalante River Canyon and its network of
tributary canyons. It's full of places to explore, bordered by the Paria River
Canyon on the west. I took this photograph with a film camera in the Dry Fork
of the Coyote Gulch tributary of the Escalante River in 2000.
Elephant Canyon, Needles District, Canyonlands NP, UT
This is a photograph from the end of Elephant Canyon looking
back down canyon. This spot has the most stunning view of the
entire Needles District, which is saying a lot. The canyon dead-
ends here, and the shot is taken from the bench above where
Druid Arch, which rivals the best arches in Arches NP, sits. Not
easy to get to here, from Elephant Hill it takes a backpack with
a one or two night stay in one of two reserved campsites in the canyon, plus a 5-7 mile dayhike to the end of the canyon and
the arch, depending on which campsite you get. Or if you can
handle a 10.8 mile dayhike you can forego the overnight stay
in the canyon. Twenty years ago I managed it on a several day
backpack that took me to other places, but that was when I
still thought I was young in my fifties. The Needles District of
Canyonlands National Park is still the favorite place I've been
in all the wild country of the Southwest.
