I had made at least three attempts to visit the Bisti Badlands over the last decade. One time I made it within a mile before being chased away by an epic thunderstorm and the most recent time resulting in a highly disruptive car accident, so it felt redemptive to finally visit it. This area is (or at least was) one of the more obscure scenic wonderlands of the Southwest tucked in the far northwest corner of New Mexico, quite a ways from any noteworthy interstate and so takes deliberate effort to drive past. This is a sparsely vegetated landscape of dinosaur-era mudstones and sandstones slowly weathered and carved by passing thunderstorms on eons to create an evolving sci-fi landscape of towering hoodoos, dendritic washes, and melting hills with petrified logs and alien egg concretions thrown in for good measure. Like many US wilderness areas it has the scars of past roads, natural resource exploration, cattle ranching, and powerlines on the horizons. Somehow word had gotten out on this area and we were surprised by the number of people we saw at the trailhead, most apparently foreign visitors. Fortunately the area is vast and trailless so most of the time we saw nobody at all.
A long very early start from Riverside got us to the trailhead parking lot right at sunset. As the sun set, the moon rose, and overnight temperatures crept down to around 18F. The overnight temperatures were more than a little intimidating but we did come prepared with suitable layers of bedding and clothing to pile on in the rooftop tent. Thankfully we slept well every night of the trip but the mornings were often a challenge of defrosting the tent and ourselves to get moving.
We had a crisp blue sky day and appreciated the little extra warmth from the sun even if counteracted by a stinging wind. From the trailhead we ended up doing a roughly 8 mile/5.5 hr counter-clockwise loop around and a little beyond the main badland area people visit here. Several places have informal names people have ascribed to features but I think it probably more appropriate to say less so that the photos can say more. The variety, creativity, and otherworldliness of the landscape stood out and I cannot point to a favorite feature or area we visited. It was great fun to climb over a rise and suddenly be presented with a new unexpected dreamland view each time. I thought the hoodoos with whimsically shaped caprocks were particularly novel (one a very convincing manta ray) as well as the rock gardens of dark rocks sitting on a light siltstone. One area had a number of very nice horizontal petrified logs eroding out of the landscape, another area had no logs but an abundance of upright stumps in growth position. Another surprise was a mud cave that went 100 ft right through a hill. I could imagine spending days here and with the right weather conditions the landscapes would only be even more dramatic and otherworldly. We did have ambitious plans to try to fit in a couple other very different landscapes into our short Southwest trip and so after completing our loop we drove onward to the even colder high elevations of Cedar Mesa and Bear's Ears at the Natural Bridges campground.
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