The Sea Turtle

Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, New Mexico

The Bisti Badlands have become a constant in my travels. Any time I leave Texas heading west, I build a stop here into the route, sometimes on the way out, sometimes on the way back. After enough visits, you learn the icons, the formations everyone photographs, the places that show up on postcards and social feeds. Once those are behind you, the work becomes quieter. Slower. More curious.

This formation caught my attention because it didn’t feel like it was trying to be seen. I started calling it the Sea Turtle almost immediately, the way the stone seems to rise and carry its weight forward, patient and ancient. I photographed it just after sunset, when the desert had gone quiet and the ground still held the day’s warmth.

Later that night, the sky changed completely. What you see above the formation isn’t color pushed for drama, it’s intense natural airglow. Bands of light moved across the sky in a way I had never witnessed before or since. It felt like the landscape itself was breathing. In a place that already feels like you’re not supposed to be there, the airglow made the night feel alive, watchful, and perfectly matched to the terrain beneath it. It felt just like The Love, Death & Robots episode "Fish Night," from Volume 1, where two stranded salesmen see ghostly prehistoric sea creatures, including a giant shark, swim across the desert night.

Context and Landscape

The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness lies in northwestern New Mexico, just south of Farmington, and is part of a remote badlands system shaped by erosion over tens of millions of years. The landscape is made up of fragile mudstone, shale, sandstone, and coal seams, remnants of an ancient coastal plain that once bordered a prehistoric inland sea.

There are no marked trails, no real facilities, and very little sense of scale when you first step into it. Hoodoos, balanced rocks, and strange silhouettes rise from the desert floor, shaped slowly by wind and water into forms that feel more biological than geological. The area is known for its silence and its vulnerability. Even a single footprint can linger for years.

At night, the badlands take on a different presence. With almost no light pollution, the sky becomes part of the landscape. Airglow, a faint natural emission caused by chemical reactions high in Earth’s atmosphere, can sometimes become visible here, adding soft bands and color that feel otherworldly but are entirely real.

Creation Notes

The foreground was photographed just after sunset and refined using focus stacking to maintain sharpness and texture throughout the formation. The sky was captured later that same night during peak airglow activity.