The Bureau of Land Management refers to this place as “Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness”.Bisti (bis-tai) means “shale hills” in Navajo. De-Na-Zin (pronounced as you’d expect, emphasis on the third syllable) means “cranes”. Wilderness it was.The entrance to this fenced in who-knows-how-many acres has impressively little guidance or information further than a sun-bleached map suggesting heading east toward some features somebody enjoyed enough to have named.There were no markers! Luckily, after getting kind of hemmed in among hoodoos, I climbed a weirdly crumbly hill and came across a cattle trail that led me to this scene.Of wild lives, I heard and glimpsed these little birds, startled one electric blue lizard, skirted lots of cow pies (which I always hope/pretend are buffalo chips), followed quite an assortment of delicate tracks in the sand, and peeked into some startlingly large burrows.
Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment 