Dan Flores

Eroded barren formations called Badlands, avoided during Western settlement at the hands of scientists and artists, have evolved into classic Western landforms and sought out destinations in our time.

I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.

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getting over the color green and learning to love badlands.

Out on the southern high plains, low down in the formations of a famous panhandle canyon called Palo Duro that gives rise to the Red River, there's a landform some long-ago imaginative appreciator named the Spanish Skirts.

One of America's internationally famous artists, Georgia O'Keeffe, first saw this canyon when she was a young art teacher in West Texas during World War I, and always thought the common name her young guide used for the Spanish skirts, Badlands is what he called them, was a peculiar miss of appreciation.

O'Keeffe didn't know it then, but in another two decades, she was going to be in a position to help other Westerners, Americans who loved interesting landscapes, and much of the world develop a proper appreciation for a landform once dismissed as useless ground taking up good space on the planet.

What O'Keeffe first saw in West Texas in 1916 were 240 million year old Permian age clays and mudstones eroded by wind and water into horizontally banded mounds.

The Spanish skirts aren't a large landform, standing at most 25 feet high.

But if your eyes are moved by color and sculptural form, as O'Keeffe's obviously were, in the right light, the Spanish skirts can take your breath away.

An initial impression is of scooped Neapolitan ice cream, plopped down blobs of earth consisting of layered stripes of different colors, at least seven different hues altogether.

The bottom base of a Spanish skirts mound is in the pale tangerine of Palo Duro's canyon floor.

Above that is a second layer, sometimes demarcated by thin horizontal stripes of white gypsum of a dark burnt hook'em horns orange.

Above that are again slender ivory bands finely drawn as if with white ink.

Then come the Latina fireworks.

In succession, there is a broad swipe of deep lavender purple, then another of a saffron yellow.

Those two finished off by an unexpected and quite wonderful band of coffee bean chocolate.