New Mexico’s Wildest Landscape Began as a Swamp

If you want to feel like you’ve stepped off a spaceship onto an alien planet, head to the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in northwestern New Mexico. This area is more commonly known as the Bisti Badlands and is almost entirely without trails, visitor centers, or any signs of plant life.

Thousands of bizarre rock formations line every direction you look, creating one of the most visually strange landscapes in the United States.

A Prehistoric Swamp

Home to some of the most interesting geology in the area, this land is home to a prehistoric swamp that existed around 70 million years ago. During this time, the land that is now the desert was home to a massive swamp along the edge of an inland sea that used to divide North America into two portions.

The climate during this period was hot and humid, encouraging the growth of massive amounts of vegetation. Dinosaurs, mammals, and other plant life perished in this land, their remains sinking into the swamp. Millions of years later, rivers buried the swamp in sand and mud. Over time, the weight of the Earth compressed the Earth into sandstone, shale, mudstone, and coal.

The Power Of Water And Wind

After several million years, the inland sea disappeared. Over time, tectonic movements pushed the buried swamp upwards to the Earth’s surface. Following the last ice age, rain began to erode the land. The different earth layers have varying degrees of hardness. The clay and mudstone layers erode quickly, but the sandstone and black coal layers remain on the surface.

These differences in erosion led to the formation of hoodoos, where the sedimentary layers of the soft earth have eroded away from the base of the hoodoo, leaving behind massive boulders on top of thin pillars of stone. The constant blasting of sand against these formations has smoothed their edges, resulting in the strange-looking formations that characterize the Bisti Badlands.

Fossilized Trees And Dinosaurs

This area is home to some of the best fossils in the region. The area was home to extensive amounts of vegetation millions of years ago. The petrified remains of massive trees line the ground in this land.

The land has also yielded the bones of several dinosaurs, including the skull of a tyrannosaurid named the Bisti Beast. This location is one of the best indicators of the drastic changes that the Earth has endured over time.