Dan Flores

I'm amazed at the sterile granularity of their mounded surfaces and at the runoff rills rainwater forms on and between them.

Like dunes, Badlands are also friable enough that they're always changing their look.

Because Badlands aren't confined to one particular region of the West, but show up scattered across its geography, I'm always on the lookout for Badlands I've not seen before and always excited to discover new stretches with new color combinations.

So I've traveled all over the West to hike around in Badlands country that's new to me.

I once drove solo all the way from West Texas to South Dakota for no other reason than to be able to wake up amidst the pastel yellow, humps-to-the-horizon landscape of Badlands National Park.

I've gone far out of my way to go for hikes, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, in the bisti or denizen Badlands wilderness of northwestern New Mexico.

I've had Badlands adventures in Teddy Roosevelt National Historic Park in North Dakota, where Teddy himself fell in love with the strange look of a topography that struck him as colorful and weirdly compelling.

More than once, I drove all the way across the horizontal length of Montana from Missoula to Makoshika State Park to experience the Terry Badlands where Evelyn Cameron photographed Montana and its wildlife a century ago.

I've hiked the badlands of Death Valley in both winter and summer.

And on the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian chain, I've blissed out more than once to a miniature river complete with waterfalls bouncing musically along through terracotta badlands in Waimea Canyon, an unexpected slice of the arid west in the middle of the blue Pacific.

There's a strange passion to all this.

It's not that I fail to appreciate high alpine meadows or towering redwoods in a Pacific Northwest rainforest, but for some reason I find wandering around a place like Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park or the Painted Desert of the Navajo Res easily as thrilling as climbing up to a glacial cirque in the Colorado Rockies.

The feel of champagne air on your skin as you stroll alone or with a companion under a flawless cobalt autumn sky through 35-foot-high mounds with the crunch of the granulated dry clay in your ears with every step.

A sense of flow as your body moves through receding and approaching elemental earth forms barren of obscuring vegetation with bands of color, a wild visual riot at every hand.

That's a sensuous immersion in place and moment that works for me.

New York expatriate writer Mabel Dodge Lujan, in her book Edge of Taos Desert, called the Badlands Country on the high road between Santa Fe and Taos a journey through a pink and yellow dream.

Maybe that's it.

Places of this kind are things we more usually encounter in dreams.

Just to experience the whole of the place with the senses dialed up to full gain, I once walked through yet another Badlands locally known as the Painted Desert.

This one on the northwestern edge of Big Bend National Park.