Bisti De-Na-Zin Wilderness Photos

I first heard of the Bisti Badlands in the 1970s while I was in high school. It is now called the Bisti De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Occasionally I would see another photo or two somewhere, but the Bisti was always far away from Wisconsin. Three decades later I finally paid a visit. After all, I had lived in New Mexico for four years, and it was about time. It was 250 miles each way from Santa Fe, but I was so hooked by the hoodoo landscape that I returned two weekends later, and many more times over the following six or seven years.

Those years were filled with numerous trips to other prominent badlands areas in northwest New Mexico, but the Bisti is the easiest to access, so even though it was the farthest away, it was an “Old Faithful” trip for me. During threatening weather, the kind that gives photographers skies to die for, the road is paved nearly all of the way to the Bisti, with well-maintained gravel road for the last few miles.

And it never really got old: each trip I wandered aimlessly at times and always found something new. Unsuccessful attempts to find some place which I had visited before almost always led to new views I had never seen before. No GPS, no map—just wander around! You would be hard pressed to get really lost here since all of the dry washes eventually head west to the parking areas. If you want coordinates to this set of rocks or that, then I can’t give them to you, since I never recorded them. Eventually I found those famous locations, but more or less by chance, and I saw so much more in the meantime.

Many of these photographs are also in my Badlands of New Mexico and More New Mexico Badlands galleries, but I thought it would be nice to gather them together in one place, along with a dozen photos not found elsewhere on this site. Here’s a little badlands fun: shrink yourself down and take a ride on the Bisti Mini-Jeep Tour.