Dan Flores

There was another scene where Bourdain and I ate level two hatch chilies and fell speechless.

The high point, though, even exceeding eating an Anthony Bourdain meal under Western stars, was the horseback ride a trio of us did along the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs, right through the red badlands around Georgia O'Keeffe's house, the very red hills she'd rendered into world-famous art.

Ever the New Yorker, Bourdain waved off the Stetson he was offered for this warm, sunny day ride.

But the guy could sit a horse.

As for me, I was in one of those dream states Mabel Dodge Lujan had written about.

At the time, I must have been paying attention, but later all I could recall was nudging a really fine horse through the Red Hills that 80 years before had become the type specimen of an iconic new kind of Western landscape.

The cameras were on, the mic was live, and a genuine American hero was on a horse beside me, and all I could entertain in my head was the rolling up and down brick red dirt of our passage.

That Badlands experience, back to a Western creation myth of sorts, is going to be hard to top.

I still dream, though.

I even dream of Mars, our solar system's ultimate desert, with red canyons 25,000 feet deep and badlands, such badlands, on a scale beyond earthly.

The gods, but what would an O'Keeffe do with badlands like those?

Yeah, it's true.

They're found all over the world in conditions that sort of mimic those of the American West, where essentially you have arid country, arid climates, and mountain ranges are canyonlands or plateaus that often produce badlands at the basis of the larger formations.

And so that's not an unusual feature

of landscapes around the planet.

And when I was working on this particular script, I mean, I had seen sort of marvelous photographs.

In fact, there's a movie out from two or three years ago that is filmed in the Danzia area.

badlands of China and it's really a pretty remarkably similar kind of looking landscape to some of those in the American West.

So yeah, this is something around the world and because of the fact that these kinds of land formations tend to be associated with really old geology, with Triassic and Permian and Jurassic sort of exposure, everywhere around the world,

These are places that scientists have been digging dinosaurs for at least the last 75 or 80 years.