Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness — rock formation
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0

Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness

  • 2 min read
  • 36.304° N 108.118° W

Interesting facts

  • The exact Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary is missing here: it falls into a time gap between the two members of the Ojo Alamo Formation.
  • Some dinosaur bones found in the younger Kimbeto Member were weathered out of older beds and buried again, making them so-called reworked fossils.
  • In places ancient coal seams caught fire and baked the surrounding rock into a hard red stone known as clinker or red dog.
  • The ceratopsian Bisticeratops, one of the horned dinosaurs that lived here, takes its name from the Bisti badlands.
  • About 74 million years ago the Western Interior Seaway made its final retreat from the area, leaving swamps and deltas where coal formed.
  • The striped Nacimiento beds hold some of the earliest Paleocene mammals and define two North American land-mammal ages, the Puercan and the Torrejonian.
  • Petroglyphs of cranes found south of the wilderness echo its name, as De-Na-Zin comes from the Navajo for standing crane.
  • The rock layers tilt about 5 degrees to the northeast, so the oldest beds surface in the southwest and the youngest in the northeast.
  • The climax of William Friedkin's 1977 film Sorcerer was shot in the Bisti badlands.

Why it is worth it

The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness is a maze of grey, white, brown and black badlands in north-western New Mexico, where mushroom-shaped hoodoos, eroded mounds and sandstone caps stand over a barren landscape of shale and coal. It covers about 45,000 acres of San Juan County and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Both parts of its name come from the Navajo language: Bisti means roughly among the adobe formations, and De-Na-Zin refers to standing cranes.

The rocks expose one of the most remarkable geological records in North America — described as the longest, most complete and most fossil-rich sequence of beds spanning the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in any single sedimentary basin in the world. Four formations appear in the wilderness. The oldest, the Fruitland Formation, consists of grey shales, thin coal seams and white sandstones; above it lie the greenish shales and siltstones of the Kirtland Formation, then the Ojo Alamo Formation, which records the boundary at the end of the age of dinosaurs, and finally the striped white and black shale and sandstone of the Nacimiento Formation. Around 200 species of plants and animals have been identified in the Fruitland and Kirtland beds, among them hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, ankylosaurs and pachycephalosaurs, as well as predators such as Daspletosaurus and Ornithomimus.

The present landscape is far younger than the rocks. The badlands themselves were carved within the last few thousand years, roughly 2,800 to 5,600 years ago, as water stripped away the soft layers. Where a harder band of sandstone protects the softer clay beneath it, the erosion leaves behind hoodoos — pillars and toadstool shapes topped by flat caps of stone. The area was designated as wilderness in 1984, and in March 2019 the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act added roughly 2,250 acres. It is the largest publicly accessible area of badlands in the San Juan Basin.

Getting there

The Bisti trailhead is reached from Farmington by driving about 36 miles south on New Mexico State Road 371, then east on County Road 7297 for about 2 miles and left for another mile to the parking area; the access roads are unpaved. A separate De-Na-Zin trailhead serves the eastern part of the wilderness. Farmington is about 48 km away in a straight line, and Durango–La Plata County Airport (DRO) in Colorado is about 100 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New Mexico 11The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in the United States 18The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in the United States 68The Most Remarkable Rock Formations 107The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders 580

From the encyclopaedia

The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness is a 45,000-acre (18,000 ha) wilderness area located in San Juan County in the U.S. state of New Mexico. Established in 1984, the Wilderness is a desolate area of steeply eroded badlands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, except three parcels of private Navajo land within its boundaries. The John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed March 12, 2019, expanded the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness by approximately 2,250 acres.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

36.30440, -108.11800per Wikidata