Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness

A 45,000 Acre Bureau Of Land Management Wilderness Of Eroded Badlands, Hoodoos And Petrified Wood, Designated 1984; No Trails, No Signs, No Water And No Facilities Of Any Kind · Farmington, New Mexico

Bisti is 45,000 acres of eroded Cretaceous badlands in the San Juan Basin, and it is one of the strangest landscapes in the United States. Soft shale and sandstone laid down on the edge of an inland sea has weathered into hoodoos, mushroom rocks, cracked-mud flats and whole fields of petrified wood, with harder caprock balanced on pedestals of clay that will eventually give way. Photographers know it by the names that have attached themselves to individual formations - the Cracked Eggs, the King of Wings, the Alien Throne - none of which are signed, mapped or marked in any way. That is the defining fact about visiting: there is a dirt car park and then there is nothing. No trail, no signpost, no water, no toilet and no phone signal, in terrain where every wash looks like every other wash and people get genuinely lost. Dinosaur and early mammal fossils are still eroding out of it, and none of them may be collected.

County Road 7500, off NM Highway 371 south of Farmington, Farmington, New Mexico, 87401, United States

Open all year, day and night, with no gate, no entrance station, no staff and no hours of any kind. There is a dirt parking area at the end of County Road 7500 and nothing else - no visitor centre, no toilet, no water, no signboard and no marked trail from the car park onward. Summer heat and the July and August storms are the real limits on when to be here, along with the state of the access road after rain or snow.

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