In an attempt to add a rest day from all the driving we’ve been doing, we tried to look for some things to do to break up our drive from Petrified Forest to Mesa Verde. We wanted to drive through Monument Valley or Canyon de Chelly, but sadly both of those (and almost everything else on Navajo Nation land) were closed due to Covid. Somewhat serendipitously, we ended up going to the Bisti Badlands, which I think we wouldn’t have otherwise discovered, but with all of its quirky rock formations and desolate landscapes, made us feel like we were transported into a Dali painting or another planet.
The main thing to know about Bisti Badlands is it’s kind of in the middle of no where. It’s on BLM land but has very very minimal infrastructure: there’s a very long and remote dirt road to get to it and once you’re there, there’s no water, no cell service, and only a pit toilet off of a small parking lot. So if you come, just make sure you’re prepared!
The hikes are also totally unmarked – we just followed a random map we found on the internet that had a series of coordinates to tell us where various landmarks were. There are a couple landmarks (which we’re not even totally sure we correctly found) including The Nursery, Cracked Eggs, and The Wings, but a hike through the Bisti Badlands mostly entails just walking around and looking at all the cool rock formations.
The Bisti Badlands used to be a pre-historic swamp that has through years of erosion and changes in climate formed this weird landscape of rocks, hoodoos, and arches. We spent almost two hours walking around the hoodoos and looking at the little rock formations.
Farmington, New Mexico
The closest town to the Bisti Badlands is Farmington which we also somewhat serendipitously drove through and stopped for lunch at a restaurant called The Chile Pod.
While we were waiting for our food and randomly Googling, we came across this NYT article about Farmington that was published just a few days prior (and also featured the restaurant that we were currently sitting in!) which profiled the small, rural town, formerly a bustling mining community now struggling to remake itself in other industries like tourism, but all of a sudden further devastated when Covid hit. With Covid and the looming election, it was a pretty sobering moment on our trip through the American southwest (where we played a game counting Trump vs. Biden signs along the road- Farmington also voted for Trump 2 to 1 in 2016) – indeed, here we were, a couple of coastal millennials who had seized the opportunity of remote work to travel the country in the midst of a pandemic; and here we were, coming to terms with it while reading a New York Times article in the middle of New Mexico.