THE WIND BLOWS my tour guide’s long hair out of his face as we walk. Gilbert Tsinnajinnie’s dark curls fly toward the wide brim of his hat, which is tan and banded with white and red like the rock formations surrounding us. The sun sinks behind a crumbling sandstone mesa, highlighting pale, weather-worn hoodoos with rivers of burgundy and streaks of black against a pink sky.
“This land is traditionally held for ceremonial purposes,” the Diné guide told me as we ventured into the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness a few hours earlier. I can see why his people—or anyone—would set aside this landscape for the most reverent and awesome of occasions while going about daily life elsewhere. Practically, higher ground offers more fertile soil and life-giving springs, Tsinnajinnie says. Mystically, Bisti puts nature’s power on display and provides a humility-inciting perspective of man’s place in geologic time. Evidence of ages past is continually revealed by the same wind blowing in our faces and the rain that falls in the San Juan Basin, which slopes from the Continental Divide to these lowlands.
Navajo Tours USA guide Ray Ignacio Jr.
The name Bisti comes from the Navajo word Bisdi or Bistahí, meaning “sediment place.” De-Na-Zin, or Dééł Naazj, means “where the sandhill cranes are,” says Kialo Winters, owner of Navajo Tours USA. While the language comes close to describing the eroded features of the layered sedimentary rock, it’s nearly impossible to fully express the aesthetic of this region. Visiting with a guide like Tsinnajinnie, who has worked for Navajo Tours USA for six years, might just be the best way to better understand such a magical place.
Our small group meets at the south parking lot in the late afternoon. After walking some distance, Tsinnajinnie looks back at where we started. He first points out the Chuska Mountains to the west, then draws our attention to the flashing light atop a metal structure near NM 371. “Anyone who visits Bisti on their own can use the cell tower as a beacon,” he says, also showing where a fence divides tribal land from BLM land at a right angle to form a useful landmark. “People do get lost.”
Hoodoos form as layers of soft rock are worn away.
With no marked trail, I’m relieved to be with someone who knows it well. Heading toward the currently dry Bisti Wash, one member of our group points out boot prints in the cracked earth. “When it rains here, the clay sticks to your soles and the silt gets slick,” Tsinnajinnie cautions. I wonder if the boot prints are now permanent marks on what I later learn is ancient inland seabed. But Tsinnajinnie gently tells me that it’s quite the opposite.
The Bisti landscape erodes at the rate of one centimeter per year. At the base of many of the formations is Lewis Shale, the oldest and softest layer, which gets undercut by frequent floods. The youngest and most resilient layer—sandstone from the Cretaceous period—sits on top and protects the layers of silt, unbaked clay, and coal in between. Some of the coal and clay burned 30 million years ago during the eruption of Ship Rock, Tsinnajinnie says.
He encourages a short break as we look at a characteristic formation: layers of soft rock protected by a slow-eroding capstone. “The taller formations, you do not want to sit on. This is an example of one we can utilize,” he says, resting on the yet-to-be-uncovered formation like a bench.
The petrified stumps and wood fragments in the story are remnants of ancient trees, preserved in quartz under mud layers that prevented their decay.
At the Alien Egg Hatchery area, rows of oval-shaped boulders nestled longways in the ground appear cracked from within. A closer look reveals rings or somewhat concentric layers formed when water flowed into the stones. “There are some eggs we call ‘still buried,’ ” Tsinnajinnie says, standing on one whose rounded top is just beginning to peek out from a mound of softer stone.
Tsinnajinnie takes us to Painter’s Palette, a hoodoo with a capstone shaped like the board on which an artist mixes colors, then leads us through the so-called Golden Gates, which will soon glimmer in the sunset glow. “This arch here was created by sandblasting,” Tsinnajinnie says. “We do get 60-mile-per-hour winds.”
In the Vanilla Hoodoos, I feel like I’m standing in the receding Cretaceous sea, the caps of the formations rising at various heights around me as if swelling waves. Glancing up to the next layer, I see a thread of black coal, formed from organic material like leaves and branches. Directing us to a forest of petrified stumps and crumbles of wood chips, Tsinnajinnie explains that when the trees were covered by mud, no air could penetrate and allow the logs to decay, so quartz took the shape and form of the wood. “This is where green trees stood 65 million years ago,” he says, gesturing. “At Petrified Forest National Park, in Arizona, the boulders are roped off, so you can’t get as close as we are today.”
Spherical boulders and pebble-sized clay pieces in the dry channel indicate they were shaped by water flow and weathering.
Now, the only vegetation is barely visible. Silver saltbush sprouts between hoodoos, while bunches of Russian thistle grab at my socks. In the distance, sand dock blooms a pale red, its leaves a shade of vibrant green.
Walking through a dry channel littered with boulders that are smaller and more spherical, like soccer balls or—more aptly—river rock, Tsinnajinnie says indeed these stones tumbled with the flow of water. As we scramble uphill, pebble-size baked clay pieces clink and crunch, not unlike how a flowerpot might after a few summers of soaking in the high-altitude sun after desert monsoons.
At the bottom, Tsinnajinnie shows us the opening of a tunnel under one of the hills. “Water enters, flows through the hill, and exits here,” he says. “No animals use these for homes.”
DID YOU KNOW?
Shark teeth and turtle shells are commonly embedded or protruding from the formations within the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness.
Nature ebbs and flows. We learn its patterns and, sometimes, stand awed at the landscape’s astonishing reminders that Earth’s geologic cycles continue to run their course.
At the start of the tour, the wind and the sun were at our backs. The gusts escorted us toward an experience we’d always dreamed of having someday. As we followed our guide, our life-size shadows stretched out in front of us. Five hours and as many miles later, the wind blows to a place that continues revealing the past. This time, our shadows stretch out behind us, larger than life.
Read more: Grab the reins to better understand the state’s natural wonders.
NAVAJO TOURS USA
In addition to tours of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, the company provides guided experiences at Chaco Canyon and Ship Rock. Sunset and Night Sky tours of the Bisti are available from mid-August through mid-October; children $54, youth $84, adult $140–$157.
