My oldest son and I recently spent a couple of days in Bisti Badlands, New Mexico and the local area. The rock formations and landscape here are other worldly. There are no trails to follow, one must either explore randomly or find GPS coordinates or generalized directions for particular areas of interest. I have now visited Bisti on two occasions, the first a few years ago and I have not yet seen everything of interest in Bisti, so I will plan to visit again at some future date, hopefully not in the summer, since the summers here are hot during the day, but the evenings and early mornings are fairly comfortable, especially during and after thunderstorms, which we were lucky to have in the evenings, when we were there. In fact one of the storms presented us with a tremendous lightning display, some of which my son captured via a GoPro camera. After the storm passed over us, I put the penthouse top of the Sportsmobile up and enjoyed the distant lightning display and cool breeze as I lay there waiting for sleep to over take me.
We were fortunate to have the area essentially to ourselves most of the time. We did see a few others come and go, but never encountered anyone while photographing and exploring the area.
As we saw storms on two sides of us and one heading towards us, during our last evening of photography in the wilderness, we decided to beat a hasty retreat to the parking area and the safety of our camping vehicle. Upon arriving at the parking area, we found another vehicle parked next to ours, but no one around. So we assumed the vehicle owner(s) were out in the wilderness area. As the storm got closer and darkness began to fall, we saw lights in the distance coming from the wilderness. We left our vehicle interior lights on as a beacon for the hikers, since otherwise it can be difficult to find ones way back to the parking area in the dark. We watched the progress of the lights approaching the parking area, eventually seeing a young couple arriving just before the serious rain began. They had planned to camp in the wilderness, but they realized that it was unsafe to be out there during a severe thunderstorm. The young man made a point to come over and thank us for our lights, which he said were a great help to them in finding their way back to the parking area. They hung around for awhile, then left, leaving the parking area totally to us for the rest of the night.
Even though, there was a hard, blowing rain for awhile during the thunderstorm, the hot desert area was mostly dry the next morning. We photographed during the early morning sunrise, then moved on to our next destination in Colorado, which will be the subject of my next post. So stay tuned for more…
Some (eventually maybe all) of the photos posted here will also be uploaded to my Flickr page, where they might be viewed more easily.
