Dan Flores

where the Spanish skirts emerge from the canyon slopes as freestanding mounds, the final flourish is often a cap of creamy white atop the chocolate, like frothed milk floating on the surface of a latte.

I've walked among the Spanish skirts in slanting reddish morning light and in the glow of yellowed sunset air, and I understand why George O'Keefe was fixated by their earth art.

On several hikes in the 19-teens, while the rest of the world was distracted by stories of trench warfare and poison gas in Europe, O'Keeffe was becoming seriously dazzled by Palo Duro Canyon earth art.

Everyone else hated the western high plains, she said.

Everything was horizontal and yellow rather than green like the east.

But as she told her friend Anita Politzer, she couldn't get over the colors and shapes of this canyon incised into the plains.

It's absurd the way I love this country, she wrote.

Lucky for those who appreciate the art of landscape, and especially lucky for those of us who are drawn by the uniqueness of Western scenery, in a United States that has had a hard time getting over the color green, O'Keeffe never recovered from her fascination with barren, eroded badlands.

When she returned to the West in 1929, she at once sought out New Mexico cliffs and badlands that reminded her of Palo Duro and the Spanish skirts.

Finally buying a seven-acre ranchette at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs northwest of Santa Fe, for the next half century, she endlessly painted the badlands.

Ignoring the inclination of homesteaders to regard Badlands as sterile, bad places to farm, or of religious types who liked to name Western geologies after Hades and Satan, O'Keeffe called her favorite Badlands the Red Hills, the White Place, the Black Place.

For decades, she offered the art of a graceful, sensual, color-saturated Western landform to America and the world.

It was an art that helped change the perception of Badlands forever.

Thomas Jefferson may not have known this, although Lewis and Clark's descriptions helped, but we all understand today that the American West is a region of many diverse landforms and ecologies.

The West is made up of extensive prairies and plains, a horizontal yellow terrain of overlapping arcs of grasslands extending westward nearly 500 miles to the foot of the Rockies.

There are mountain uplifts, many of them individual ranges like the Wasatch or the Bitterroots, within a larger framing of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, all those uplifts, with one exception, the Uintas in Utah, running north and south through the continent.

There is a vast canyon lands etched into the Colorado Plateau, a coastal rainforest in the northwest.

There are true deserts of shrubs and cactus, some hot zone deserts, others cold deserts of extensive sagebrush steppes.

But if one of the grand characteristic traits of the West, making it an exception to green America, is aridity, lovers of the region ought to be especially intrigued by its naplu ultra-arid landscape.

This is the West's presentation of exposed geology where chlorophyll green often does not appear at all in favor of an Earth colored something like Mars.