Bisti Badlands, New Mexico

 

Ellen on a walk in the Bisti Badlands.

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The term "badlands" sounds harsh, but barren eroding landscapes have been called that for centuries. Here in New Mexico, craggy lava flows, though not erosional, are called malpaises (bad country or bad places). French trappers called badlands les mauvaises terre a traverser, meaning “bad lands to traverse,” perhaps the origin of the English term. The trappers were probably influenced by the Lakota (according to Wikipedia), who called these places mako sica (bad or eroded land). Regardless of language, it’s not hard to understand why landscapes nearly devoid of vegetation and animal life might have been considered “bad” if you needed to find dinner or get across them on a hot day.

But it’s all relative. If I were a French trapper, or Lakota, or a Spanish conquistador, or even a modern farmer (or an antelope), I might find the term appropriate, but as a wanderer camping in empty places with my camera, badlands doesn’t ring true. I’ve had some pretty good times in some pretty bad lands. 

Badlands National Park, by virtue of being a park, is probably the most recognized badlands site in the U.S., but it’s one among many equally spectacular places. If you saw the movie, Nomadland, you’ll remember that Fern, played by Francis McDormand, spent time working at a campground near the South Dakota Park and found herself calmed by its beauty, though she eventually moved on, as nomads do. Ellen and I visited colorful badlands in Oregon in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument on our first road trip after retiring in 2021 before moving on ourselves to float the John Day River in our packrafts.

Ellen in the Painted Hills at the John Day Fossil Beds, Oregon.

Wyoming’s Red Desert, where I spent lots of time before moving south, has national park quality badlands, though wilderness protection might be more appropriate for these remote places. The Honeycomb Buttes in the northern Red Desert and the Adobe Town and Skull Rims farther south are spectacular and little-visited, at least compared to the South Dakota badlands. I once camped on the Adobe Town rim with Ellen and Bei and discovered a family of coyotes with pups denned in an eroded hole just below our camp. They seemed undisturbed by us, maybe remote enough not to have been harassed by humans. On a hot day during another Adobe Town trip, I found a soapstone medicine pipe in the cool shade of a rock tower. 

A wash below the Skull rim in Wyoming.

New Mexico, where I live now, has more than its share of badlands. I’m just beginning to learn about them and have only recently begun to explore. Some of the most well-known, are the Bisti (pronounced Bist-eye, not Bist-eee) Badlands south of Farmington. The Bisti are part of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area surrounded by Navajo, BLM, and private lands. In recent years they’ve gotten increasing attention, probably because their weird erosional formations attract photographers, but when we were there in April (2025), despite a surprising number of campers in the main parking area, we mostly had the place to ourselves as we wandered among hoodoos, “cracked eggs,” and petrified wood. 

A downside of the term “badlands” is that some think that they are literally bad, with little value except perhaps for oil and gas drilling or other destructive activities. This, of course, is not the case. Badlands are beautiful and unique, deserving of preservation.

Early morning in the Bisti Badlands.

Bisti Badlands.

Bisti Badlands erosion.

There are a few hardy shrubs in the badlands.

Formations known as the stone wings in the Bisti Badlands.

The nearby Angel Peak area is also vast and eroded.

Empty Space

An abandoned ranch cabin on the Bar X Road, deep in the Red Desert.  

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Many of us who have lived in Wyoming for a long time but weren’t born  here (and some that were) notice from time to time how lucky we are.  Imagine how many people can’t imagine living in the mountains, or driving 15 minutes to go skiing or mountain biking, or that the Red Desert exists.   Imagine antelope being exotic or not seeing storms or the lights of home fifty miles away.

Earlier this fall, I camped one weekend with Ed Sherline (another photographer) near the Oregon Buttes, a landmark on the Oregon Trail.  Migrants traveling west along what now are just wagon ruts through the sagebrush were probably less romantic about all of the open space and the badlands, but Ed and I both grew up “out east” and noted after we left our camp and were driving home that we had traversed more than fifty miles of territory without seeing another car or an occupied dwelling. 

Remnants of an old mind near South Pass, near the Sweetwater River.

Antelope.

Sandstone on the southern flanks of the Oregon Buttes.

The Oregon Buttes, viewed from the south.  On the Oregon Trail, these marked the passage into Oregon territory.

Badlands south of the Oregon Buttes.  

Badland erosion.

The view southwest from atop badlands south of the Oregon Buttes.

Wild horses south of the Oregon Buttes.

Coyote taken at the same cabin as in the lead photo.  

The Bar X road with typical traffic.

A very long, but not very watery watering trough.

Red Desert highway.

Desert elk, south of the Bar X Ranch, heading for the sand dune in the distance. 

Ephemeral towns around Wyoming's Great Divide Basin

The view east from Bairoil, Wyoming.  

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Through history people have lived around the margins of endorheic basins.  Some are filled with water, like the Aral Sea in Central Asia, while others are seas of dunes, like the Tarim Basin in Western China, once an obstacle that split the Silk Road into two routes to avoid the Taklimakan Desert (rough English translation:  If you go in, you won't come out), that occupies its interior.  The Taklimakan is so dry that natural mummies, so well preserved despite their 3000+ years that you can look into their faces and imagine them alive, sometimes emerge from the sand.  Some have red hair and blue eyes, immigrants to China from Europe. 

Tuyuguo, a still-occupied town on the margin of the Taklimakan Desert.

Endorheic is a technical term that describes places with no external drainage—rain that falls in these basins doesn’t find its way to the ocean, instead evaporating in place or seeping into groundwater.  Death Valley, famously hot and below sea level is endorheic.   

Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin (GDB), another endorheic basin, is not so well known or so well protected, and many people don’t know that the Continental Divide splits around it after descending from the Wind River Mountains to its north.  In all, it occupies about 3,900 square miles of mostly BLM land, with significant areas owned by ranchers, leased by energy companies, or occupied eccentrically (or creepily if that’s a word) by a handful of desert dwellers. 

Were it not for energy extraction, there would be little reason for most people to live near this harsh place.  It shares Wyoming’s howling wind and frigid winter with the rest of the State, but none of its spectacular mountains, though the Ferris, Green, and Wind River ranges are visible from within.  Around the margins are ephemeral towns that come and go with the fickle energy market:  Wamsutter, Lamont, Bairoil, and Jeffrey City.  A few larger and more permanent towns occupy sites along the Union Pacific Railroad to the basin's south:  Rawlins and Rock Springs are the largest.

I’ve photographed in and around the GDB for years, usually drawn to abandoned houses in the interior or wild horses that live there, or to desert places like the Honeycomb Buttes, but in January Ed Sherline and I left Laramie to have a look at some of these towns, each with its own character, and all temporary.  I doubt that any have the staying power of China’s Silk Road towns, still present all of these thousands of years after they were established. 

Jeffrey City is perhaps the most “famous” of the GDB towns among ghost town aficionados and in the boom-bust history of the West, though it isn’t truly a ghost town;  50-100 people still live here. In summer, cross-country cyclists stop for a meal and a place to sleep after pedaling across this particularly empty stretch of Wyoming.  In winter, snow drifts into abandoned townhouses and dormitories built to house workers during the uranium boom in the late 1970s.  A church, a bar, and a potter's shop are still used, but most other businesses as well as a modern brick building housing and Olympic-sized swimming pool are closed up tight.  

Bachelor Apartment #2.  Jeffrey City, Wyoming.

   

 Named “Home on the Range” by its first homesteaders in the 1930s, the town was renamed in the late 1950s for C.W. Jeffrey, a Rawlins doctor who financed a plan to extract uranium from nearby deposits to fuel nuclear power plants.  Jeffrey City boomed until the nuclear power industry suddenly declined after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979.  In fact, the decline was breathtaking.  95% of Jeffrey City’s residents left in a two-year period.  The story is fascinating, and I won’t reproduce it here, but if you’re interested, an Idaho researcher named Michael Amundson published an engaging and comprehensive history that can be accessed online (pdf).

Ed and I skirted the eastern and northern margins of the GDB on a snowy, grey, windy day, stopping in Lamont and Bairoil before finding a campsite at the little-used Jeffrey City landfill in Crook's Gap, chosen not for aesthetics, but because it occupies a drainage perpendicular to the prevailing wind.  We woke before dawn, made coffee, packed our frozen and unwashed dinner dishes, and headed back north to photograph Jeffrey City in the dawn light.  Then, like many before us we drove away.

Grandma's Cafe (then "Anelope" [spelling correct] Cafe), Lamont.  

Trailer, Lamont, Wyoming.

Trailer, Lamont.

Well pipe, Bairoil, Wyoming

International truck.  Bairoil.

Truck interior, Bairoil.

International truck door.  Bairoil.

Baptist Church.  Jeffrey City, Wyoming.

Hair, Etc.  Jeffrey City Quonset hut.

Green Mountain Bus Lines.  Jeffrey City.

Volkswagen with no volks.  Jeffrey City.

Trailer and town homes.  Jeffrey City.

Not town home.  Jeffrey City.

GMC truck interior.  Jeffrey City.

Art opening tonight at the UW Math and Science Teaching Center

Badlands at Robber's Gulch, in the Red Desert north of Baggs, Wyoming.

I'm participating in an art show that opens tonight (November 5) at the Math and Science Teaching Center on the University of Wyoming campus.  The opening is from 6:30-8:30, so if you're in town, stop by and have a look.  There will be lots of art there from local artists. The show is on the 4th floor of Wyoming Hall.

Honeycomb Buttes, Red Desert, Wyoming.

Dawn, Pine Bluffs, Wyoming.

Creeped Out in the Red Desert

A SchoolsChurch bus (#79) at an abandoned home south of Wamsutter, in the Red Desert.

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Abandoned places in Wyoming rarely creep me out.  I've visited a lot of them.  But an empty house  in the Red Desert combined enough creepy elements to be featured in the kind of movie that I never watch--the ones where doors lurch open revealing menacing John Boehner-like figures, skin taught and orange, driven mad by the wind or the Tea Party. 

Not far from Wamsutter, in the tiny town named Red Desert, a man was once found long-dead in his ramshackle house, the subject of a dark installation at the UW Art Museum several years ago.  In a darkened room of the museum, you peered into the house through dirty windows and heard his old radio, broadcasting from the past. Crickets chirped.  Boo!

Ed Sherline and I were on our way home from a weekend of photographing classically pretty landscapes deep in the Red Desert between Baggs and Wamsutter.  We'd spent much of the previous day negotiating a confusing network of drilling rig access roads to camp at the base of the Haystacks, badlands east of Adobe Town. I'd found an arrowhead and a mano stone among the sand dunes, and listened to coyotes say goodnight to the setting sun.   

After spending a nice morning wandering in the sagebrush shooting photos of orange-tinged badlands and silver light on rabbitbrush, we packed up and headed for home.  Ed had a dinner to attend, and I was hoping to get to Laramie by 2 p.m. to take Bei to an ice skating event.  We almost made it to the interstate without stopping, but circled back to have another look at an abandoned compound north of the road. There may have been a No Trespassing sign posted at one time.  A square of plywood was nailed to a fencepost near the long driveway, but nothing was stapled to it, so we drove the quarter-mile-long two-track to the site.  

The house itself raised the first red flags, even from a distance.  Sheathed in stolen (or scavenged) billboards advertising McDonald's, the Ptarmigan Hotel, and a Ramada Inn, the place suggested a struggle for survival far off the grid.  A car in the yard wasn't just abandoned, it was flipped upside down and riddled with bullet holes. An old school bus, windows shattered, was filled with old clothes and a mattress, and a Bible lay open to a page defining "God's Word."  A shed, also made from billboards, was buried up to its eaves. A teddy bear lay fading in the sun, face down in the dirt, the store security button still clamped to its back.  A dead raven rotted in front of the entrance to the house, it's ribs bleached white, contrasting with black feathers still clinging to its head and wings.  The house was full of old clothing and lined with tattered blankets meant (ineffectively) to keep out the cold wind.  

We snapped photos, eager to document the place and get the hell out of there.

In Eastern Wyoming, abandoned farms tell stories of hard times and changing demographics, where grown children migrate to Denver for excitement and opportunity.  Along highways, abandoned businesses speak of normal struggles with a tough economy.  But this place suggested a life gone off the rails. Who were these people?  What happened to them?  

We hit the interstate, fueled up, and drove towards home, looking twice at the fading billboards along the way.

Happy friggin' Halloween or something.  This dead raven greeted us from the dirt directly in front of the house.

Great idea!  Sheath your house with billboards!

Interior view of the bus driver's seat.  A 1997 calendar was taped above the side window.

An open Bible on one of the front seats.  I didn't set this up.

"I'm Lovin' It" at McDonald's.

A makeshift animal pen behind the house.  Or something.

Nice landscaping idea.  Let's turn our abandoned cars upside down and shoot them!