Dan Flores

But it's mostly a really visually compelling kind of landscape.

And I think...

That is probably why it drew so many photographers and artists.

As Georgia O'Keeffe said, I mean, she said, I don't have to invent these paintings.

I just paint what's there.

Right.

And here it is with all this arresting grace and rhythm to it.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the great national parks built around Badlands in the West is Petrified Forest in Arizona.

I mean, it's a Badlands, but it is endlessly exposing fossils and petrified wood.

And so, yeah, that's another, to me, part of the appeal of a place like that is that every time you go—

Things have changed.

I mean, these clay mounds are pretty friable, and so they can be altered by weather, even the weather of two or three years.

If you get a lot of rainstorms, it will change the way they look.

So unlike, say, a granite peak that pretty much remains the same throughout your lifetime, this is country that is changing at a pretty interestingly rapid rate.

Yeah.

And a lot of the Badlands in Montana are from the old, the ancient inland sea that extended all the way from the Gulf across the continent and right through Montana.

So yeah, that's one of the things that I think you get to do when you're

walking around or hiking, backpacking in country like this, is you do get to imagine these kind of vast sweeps of time.

And, you know, that's part of the appeal of the West.

Yep, for sure.