I arrived about two hours before sunrise and set out to explore some of the Bisti portion of the wilderness. The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness area is 45,000 acres of badlands location south of Farmington, New Mexico. It is a desolate area of eroded cliffs and formations.

I started in the dark and walked out about 2 miles to the cracked egg area. Although some portions are relatively flat and open other areas have steep obstacles – bluffs, rocky hills or hoodoos that require making a detour. I usually get temporarily lost in the dark even with a GPS. An almost full moon made getting around a little easier. Here’s a flat area but hills and bluffs can be seen in the background. The sun was just rising.

Around the cracked egg area or alien egg factory that I like to call it are lots of interesting formation within an easy walk.

There are many interesting hoodoos nearby.

And more.

There have been dinosaur fossils found at Bisti. I’ve never found any but there are petrified trees and stumps. Fragments of petrified trees are easy to find. Here’s a nice petrified log.

Hiked out to the “eagle” nest. It’s a large old raptor nest on the ledge of a large formation. It was probably not an eagle but a ferruginous hawk. This is about 2 mile as the crow flies from the parking lot. Longer because of many detours around bluffs and formations.

There are a lot of interesting formations and you can let your imagination run trying to think about what the formation looks like. Any guesses on this one.

I wanted to find little table I had found a few years back. It was a very slim pedestal with a flat rock on top. It appeared quite fragile and I wondered if it was still around. With the constant erosion, formations change. I found the correct spot but it was gone, probably the pedestal weathered away the flat slab fell. Ii did find other table like formation nearby. Here’s a just a couple of them.

The small one above probably won’t be around too much longer either. I did a total of 11 miles of wandering around and I was pretty tired carrying around my camera gear. I left for Farmington and breakfast around 11am. I’ll be back out for sunset. Here’s one last image at sunrise.