Dan Flores

These are the places old worlders named Badlands.

The West Badlands are actually an array of distinctive landforms.

They don't occupy a single region the way the Rockies or the Sonoran Desert do, but tend to erupt from the edges of these larger divisions in eroded lowlands of the plains or at the feet of the soaring cliffs of the Colorado Plateau or in the foothills of mountains in the deserts.

particularly in contrast to the West's mountain ranges with their forests and snowcaps, as their name implies badlands long suffered from a spin problem.

On initial encounter, they obviously lacked appeal for primates who require water, wood, and shade to be comfortable.

Even more problematic during western settlement, Badlands offered little or no promise of economic possibilities, lacking exploitable minerals, trees, even grass.

People from the green countrysides of northern Europe or the eastern half of America reacted to Badlands as a kind of worst-version desert antithesis of everything normal and desirable.

As for actually conferring the descriptor bad on Badlands, it seems to have been the French who first cast those aspersions when their explorers encountered them on the northern plains.

They called the sterile, multicolored mounds they found there mauvais terre, badlands, because they presented so few inducements, essentially none, for a European looking to settle the country.

Badlands take on a great many forms and colors, but like the Spanish skirts, the classic version is an undulating set of variably striped clay or shale mounds.

They're often found in conjunction with other geology, harder sandstones with narrow slot canyons, spires, and hoodoos, upright pedestals capped with a stone that's preserved the clay column beneath.

Smooth and curving with swirling connected hemispheric mounds, classic Badlands throw up wild shadowing when hit with low angle sun.

Their particular drama of shadows and light must have made little impression on people looking for a home.

But there was an aesthetic drama there and ignoring it wouldn't prevail forever.

The creation of the West Badlands goes back to sediments, ultimately existing as shales, clays, and mudstones that precipitated to the bottoms of river, lake, and ocean shorelines 10,000 to 240 million years ago.

So stretches of badlands are often a geological gift of exposed Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Permian soils and rocks.

In some badlands, the striped 35-foot mound in front of you may preserve deposits that took 45 million years and several geologic periods to deposit, which is why there can be such a variety of different colored soils.

Because they were created from the shorelines of bodies of water that existed millions of years ago, and because water and wind erosion have laid them bare as landforms, Badlands everywhere in the world tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history.

In fact, it was as scientific laboratories that Badlands first emerged as an exciting and important landform destination in the West.

Everywhere in the world they're found, in fact, the Middle East, Spain, Tuscany, Peru, Argentina, New Zealand, Taiwan, in the Danzia formations of China, badlands we now realize tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history.