Ep. 24: Getting Over the Color Green and Learning to Love Badlands

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Speaker 1: Eroded barren formations called badlands avoided during Western settlement at the hands of scientists and artists, have evolved into classic Western landforms and sought out destinations in our time. I’m Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: Meets the harvest.

00:00:25
Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. Enjoy responsible, getting over the color green, and learning to love badlands Out on the Southern high Planes. Low down in the formations of a famous Panhandle canyon called Pallo Duro that gives rise to the Red River, there’s a landform some long ago imaginative appreciator named the Spanish Skirts. One of America’s internationally famous artists, Georgia O’Keefe, first saw this canyon when she was a young art teacher in West Texas during World War One and always thought the common name her young guide used for the Spanish Skirts bad lands is what he called them, was a peculiar miss of appreciation. O’Keefe didn’t know it then, but in another two decades she was going to be in a position to help other Westerners, Americans who loved interesting landscapes, and much of the world developed a proper appreciation for a landform once dismissed as useless ground taking up good space on the planet. What O’Keefe first saw in West Texas in nineteen teen sixteen, where two hundred and forty million year old permium age clays and mudstones eroded by wind and water into horizontally banded mounds. The Spanish skirts aren’t a large landform, standing at most twenty five feet high. But if your eyes are moved by color and sculptural form, as o’keefes obviously were, in the right light, the Spanish skirts can take your breath away. An initial impression is of scooped Neapolitan ice cream PLoP down blobs of earth consisting of layered stripes of different colors, at least seven different hues altogether.

00:02:42
Speaker 2: The bottom base of.

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Speaker 1: A Spanish skirt’s mound is in the pale tangerine of Paalo Duro’s canyon floor. Above that is a second layer, sometimes demarcated by thin horizontal stripes of white gypsum of a dark burnt hook horns orange. Above that are again slender ivory bands, finally drawn as if with white ink. Then come the Latina fireworks. In succession. There is a broad swipe of deep lavender purple, then another of a saffron yellow. Those two finished off by an unexpected and quite wonderful band of coffee bean chocolate. 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 froth 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 Georgia O’Keefe was fixated by their earth art on several hikes in the nineteen teens. While the rest of the world was distracted by stories of trench warfare and poison gas in Europe, O’Keefe 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 Pollitzer, she couldn’t get over the colors and shapes of this canyon in size 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 the United States that has had a hard time getting over the colored green. O’Keefe never recovered from her fascination with barren, eroded badlands. When she returned to the West in nineteen twenty nine, she at once sought out new Mexico cliffs and bad lands that reminded her of Palo Duro and the Spanish Skirts, finally buying a seven acre ranch at at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs northwest of Santa Fe. For the next half century, she endlessly painted the bad lands, ignoring the inclination of homesteaders to regard bad lands as sterile bad places to farm, or of religious types who like to name Western geologies after hades and Satan. O’Keefe called her favorite bad lands 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 bad lands 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 plaints, a horizontal yellow terrain of overlapping arcs of grasslands extending westward nearly five hundred miles to the foot of the Rockies. There are mountain uplifts, many of them individual ranges like the Wasatch or the Bitter Roots, within a larger framing of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades all those uplifts, with one exception, the Uentas 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 coal deserts of extensive sagebrush steps. 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 air 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. These are the places Old worlders named badlands.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: The West.

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Speaker 1: Badlands are actually an array of distinctive landforms. They don’t occupy a single region the way the rockies of 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 snow caps. As their name implies, bad lands long suffered from a spin problem. On an initial encounter, they obviously lacked appeal for primates, who require water, wood, and.

00:07:59
Speaker 2: Shade to become comfortable.

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Speaker 1: Even more problematic, during Western settlement, bad lands 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 bad lands as a kind of worst version, desert antithesis of everything normal and desirable. As for actually conferring the descript or bad on bad lands, 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 mave terre bad lands because they presented so few inducements, essentially none for a European looking to settle the country. Bad Lands take on a great many forms and colors, but 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 ten thousand to two hundred and forty million years ago. So stretches of bad lands are often a geological gift of exposed Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Permian soils and rocks, and some bad lands the stripe thirty five foot mound in front of you may preserve deposits that took forty five 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, bad lands everywhere in the world tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history. In fact, it was as scientific laboratories that bad lands 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. Bad Lands we now realize tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history for travelers moving across North America from east to west, As was the case for Americans in the eighteen hundreds, badlands first cropped up in places like West Texas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, then emerged in scattered locations from New Mexico to California. They draped the whole bottom half of Utah and appear as far north on the plains as Montana and Alberta. In the nineteenth century, almost everywhere, the edges of mountain ranges, canyon defiles, or sweeping plains erupted into exposed bad lands. Paleontologists found them to be crucial for the fossil discoveries that took Darwinian evolution from theory to fact, which made them a peculiar scientific destination.

00:11:56
Speaker 2: In the United States.

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Speaker 1: The work that turned Western badlands into a mecca for paid ileontology began in eighteen forty nine, when doctor John Evans explored the Dakota Badlands and published a scientific article on their possibilities. From that point, a wide range of luminaries, like Yellowstone Park advocate Ferdinand van Derver Hayden, intensively sought out the West’s bad lands to dig fossils. In the post Darwin era, Yale paleontologist Othnil Marsh was stimulated by a stirring Thomas Huxley lecturer in New York in eighteen seventy six to assemble a chronology of horse evolution that became the principal evidence to support Darwin’s theory.

00:12:39
Speaker 2: Of evolution by natural selection.

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Speaker 1: These days, Jack Horner and other modern dinosaur scholars still ply the bad lands for major discoveries from the continent’s remote past. We’ve gotten a version of this in the opening scenes of at least.

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Speaker 2: Half the Jurassic Park movies.

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Speaker 1: Bad Lands are still the primary target of the modern dinosaur hunt in the United States, Canada, and China today. Post Civil War American explorer John Wesley Powell, who saw and wrote more about the West than anyone else of his time, said prophetically of the bad lands, he’d explored that they were, as he put it, a desert to the agriculturist, a mind to the paleontologist, and a paradise to the artists.

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Speaker 2: As usual, pale got it exactly right.

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Speaker 1: While scientific investigation came first and is still underway, for the past one hundred years, it’s been artists, photographers, hikers, and simple lovers of landscape who have turned these once maligned landforms into scenery appreciated for its sensuousness and aesthetics. Bad Lands are like the western deserts in that respect, but you have to admit it took someone like a Georgia O’Keefe or an Edward Abbey to make the rest of us begin to pay attention. Bad Lands reputations may have begun to change for some Americans even before O’Keefe began to paint, though about a century before our time. With homesteading of much of the West almost over and the automobiles starting to make formerly dreaded and even dangerous places suddenly less formidable, badlands began a slow process of shedding their former treatment as worthless waste. In eighteen ninety nine, explorer Robert Hill descended the real Grand River in West Texas through future Big Band National Park, the story of which he published in Century Magazine in nineteen oh one. It took Hill nearly a month of constant familiarity with sites like Vermilion Foothills of Red Clay, as he wrote, before the adjective’s weird, repulsive, spiteful, bizarre, and sterile finally dropped from his verbal palatee, replaced with some grudging admiration of form and color, but eventually, with a lot of practice, Hill did began to appreciate this new Western landform as a visual feature he could admire. Robert Hill’s journey and article were a kind of watershed take on bad lands, an early break from the dismissive place that occupied in landscape aesthetics in the nineteenth century and earlier. It’s interesting and worth some reflection. I think that with a landform that offered no economic possibilities, whose lure for some was scientific but for most esthetic, a disproportionately high number of women emerged as admirers of bad lands scenery. Hill was initially followed by the literary naturalist John C. Van Dyke, who wrote marvelous descriptions of the Grand bad Lands of Death Valley in his early twentieth century volume The Deserts. But it was Mary Austin who emerged as a California rival to Van Dyke as an early promoter of a bad lands esthetic, providing an American desert appreciation that even prefigures ed Abbey’s with her book The Land of Little Rain. Then there was the unlikely British expatriot photographer Evelyn Cameron, delighting through her viewfinder at the Northern Plains badlands near her Terry, Montana ranch. Cameron also became a devoted lover of badland scenery. Cameron and her husband were naturalists who studied and sometimes tamed wolves, coyotes, foxes, and birds of prey from the marvelous badlands she hiked and photographed, and who then watched in horror as homesteaders from the East and Europe tried valiantly, but with signal lack of success, to settle eastern Montana in the nineteen teens and nineteen twenties. Cameron was followed on the Northern Plains by the North Dakota artist Zoe Byler, whose paintings of the almost science fiction landscapes along the Little Missouri River were attracting attention to both the place and the artists by the nineteen twenties, a decade before O’Keeffe’s Badlands Oils would take the New York art scene by storm. When Georgia O’Keefe’s portrayals of the undulating, naked badlands mounds of New Mexico first went up in galleries in Manhattan, the initial reaction was shock and revulsion. Some Eastern critics concluded the artists must possess some psychological scar that frightened her of water. Of course, that wasn’t it. In the nineteen thirties, two decades after seeing Paaloduro in the Spanish skirts, after years of life as Alfred Stieglitz’s model and artist wife in New York, O’Keefe bought a small ranch at at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs and turned her work from flowers toward the hot colored badlands and cliffs around her home. She found the curvilinea red mounds out her door, charged with all the suppleness and grace of the human form. Why do you love these barren landscapes? So, an interviewer from Boston asked her years later, clearly puzzled at her passion for places so far removed from the conventions of beauty. I like color, O’Keefe replied, in the east, everything is green, green, green. I looked around me and wondered what one might paint. Plus, bad lands are an especially fine place to climb around in, she exclaimed. It was the shapes that fascinated me, the shapes of the hills. One of O’Keefe’s Eastern biographers visited to try to understand the appeal of such country, and concluded that the landforms that excited O’Keefe as her landscape mus were in fact bizarre, garishly colored, and in fact ought to be extravagantly tasteless, vulgar, and unbelievable. But for a painter, this was a landscape that offered up the earth itself as abstract modern art. All one had to do was paint what was there. The results were classics of a great career, Petternal and the Red Hills from nineteen thirty six, Red Hills and Bones from nineteen forty one, The Gray Hills nineteen forty two, and the Black Place three nineteen forty four.

00:19:40
Speaker 2: And so Keith told her.

00:19:41
Speaker 1: Friends, Rebecca Strand and Arthur Dove, after finding and buying her ghost Ranch home, then moving to New Mexico full time following Stieglitz’s passing.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: I am west.

00:19:53
Speaker 1: Again, and it is as fine as I remembered it, maybe finer. There’s nothing to say about it except the fact that for me it is the only place. I’m about one hundred miles from the railroad, sixty eight from Santa Fe, eighteen miles from a post office, and it is good. I wish you could see what I see out the window. The earth, pink and yellow cliffs to the north, the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning, lavender sky behind a very long, beautiful tree covered mesa to the west, peak and purple hills in front, and the scrubby, fine, dull green cedars, and a feeling of much space. It is a very beautiful world. I wish you could see it with John Wesley Powell and O’Keefe, with Robert Hill and John c. Van Dyke, and Mary Austin and Evelyn Cameron, and many years later Edward Abbey, to show the rest of us how to love arid and bad lands. Country. Badlands have slowly progressed from denigrated are just ignored. Was stern landforms to settings many of us are drawn to and avidly seek out. Almost shockingly, in our time, badlands have become the sites of national parks, South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, Theodore Roosevelt Historical Park in North Dakota, Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, Colorado, Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah, Death Valley National Park in California, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. There are also numerous badlands state parks Mikoshika and Eastern Montana for one, Toadstool Geologic Park in Nebraska for another, Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, and even a sizeable number of official federal wildernesses like the Ohito Badlands and the Bistie Badlands, wildernesses in New Mexico. Once passed over and scorned by homesteaders, then ignored in the push to create national forests in mountains and national parks in western canyons, the West badlands have somehow acquired an audience of admirers in the last hundred years. So it’s probably clear enough that I’m bad Lands smitten myself. I’m powerfully drawn to bad lands sculptural shapes and to a coloring that can easily rival a box of crayons. I’m amazed at the sterile granularity of their mounded surfaces and at the runoff reels rain water forms on and between them. Like dunes, bad lands are also friable enough that they’re always changing their look. Because bad lands aren’t confined to one particular region of the West, but show up scattered across its geography, I’m always on the lookout for bad lands 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 bad Lands National Park. I’ve gone far out of my way to go for hikes, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, in the Bisti or data Zen Badlands wilderness of northwestern New Mexico. I’ve had bad lands 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. Hiked the bad Lands of Death Valley in both winter and summer, and on the island of Kowaii in the Hawaiian Shane. I’ve blissed out more than once to a miniature river complete with waterfalls, bouncing musically along through terra cotta badlands in Why may A 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 failed 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 drilling 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 thirty five 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.

00:25:16
Speaker 2: A wild visual riot.

00:25:18
Speaker 1: At every hand. That’s a sensuous immersion in place and moment that works for me. New York expatriate writer Mabel Dodge Luhan and her book Edge of Taos Desert called the bad Lands 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 the full gain. I once walked through yet another bad lands locally known as the Painted Desert, this one on the northwestern edge of Big Ben National Part. It was a cloudless morning in June. Big Ben is as far south in North America as you can get and still be in the United States, and at that latitude, June means shearing heat that’s felt in the nostrils with every inhalation. It’s heat that is also a smell. It can even leave a coppery taste in the mouth. This particular morning began at seventy eight degrees, but my thermometer read ninety two by nine am, ninety eight by eleven, and one hundred and eight shortly after noon. By that point, my body felt like a bag of mostly water. The blast furnace big Ben’s painted desert desperately wanted to reduce to raisin form. Wandering half lost in that astonishing bad lands. It struck me while in the midst of it, like being on a planet made up of herds of recumbent gray and lavender elephants whose bodies had partly melted into the ground. I remind myself at one thirty PM that five hours in a sauna is more than enough. The heat, bug screeching of cicadas in the Tamaris thicket where I’d parked my jeep guided me back to shade and safety, but even on one hundred and twelve degree day, I lingered longer in that world of elephantine forms than I should have, reluctant to give up those visions and such a sense of being fully alive. My ultimate bad Lands experience so far went down a decade ago, almost by accident. At least, it seemed accidental to have Anthony Bourdain’s producer call and inquire if I was interested in helping out with a Part’s unknown episode. They wanted to film in and around Santa fe and who then asked whether I could appear in a few scenes with Tony without looking like a deer in headlights. The answer was a foregone conclusion. Although I wasn’t entirely sure about the headline part the accident. I discovered eventually that Stephen Rinella, who at that time used the same production company Bourdain did, was behind the scenes of that phone call. The Parts Unknown shooting schedule was crazy. They had five days to film seven scenes, and since Burdaine arrived with a vague Old West caricature of New Mexico, some of those scenes got brainstormed on the fly. I joined them on the second day of shooting, a day when we were miked up for eight hours, and that ended with a campfire cookout under a full moon and soaring canyon spires, with Bourdain preparing a meal for himself and me and three generations of a local Spanish family. There was another scene where Bourdain and I ate level two hatch chilis 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 Burdane 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 Lewhn 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, eighty 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 bad lands 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 twenty five thousand feet deep and bad lands such bad lands on a scale beyond earthly the gods, But what would an O’Keeffe do with bad lands like those?

00:30:31
Speaker 3: So Dan, in this episode, you’re talking about bad lands, and you brought up an aspect of this sort of regional feature that I hadn’t really considered in depth, and that is that the bad lands are sort of a landscape that we think of is unique to the American West, and it’s this regional distinctiveness. And then you point out it’s a global phenomenon. And there’s a whole lot of aspects of the West that you know, have parallels around the globe on different continents. But in this you touch on bad lands as a global geological phenomenon.

00:31:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s true, they’re 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 bad lands at the basis of the larger formations. And so that’s a, you know, 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. There’s in fact, there’s you know, a movie out from two or three years ago that is in the Danzia bad Lands of China, and it’s really a pretty remarkably similar kind of looking landscape to some of those in the American West.

00:32:10
Speaker 2: So, yeah, this is.

00:32:10
Speaker 1: 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 seventy five or eighty years. I mean, this has become kind of the target sort of landscape for the dinosaur high around the world. And that’s primarily why is because the bad lands are mostly composed of these really old mudstones and siltstones that have been exposed more recently, but that date back to the times before sixty five million years ago.

00:33:01
Speaker 3: And if you’d asked me where they find dinosaurs, I would have told you Montana, Hell Creek Formation, and then I would have said Mongolia. Yeah, And I could have described to you the landscape that they’re found in Mongolia, but I wouldn’t have labeled that image in.

00:33:18
Speaker 2: My mind as bad lands. But that’s exactly what it is. Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

00:33:22
Speaker 1: And so it’s a universal planetary kind of phenomenon, and we were lucky to have lots of expressions of it in the American West. And so I was trying with this particular episode to convey to listeners and watchers this sense that bad lands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were called that because this was not the sort of landscape you were looking for if you were hoping to settle somewhere in the West. It didn’t have grass, it didn’t have trees, it didn’t have it didn’t have mineral deposits. Hence, these early descriptions referred to those kinds of places as bad lands, not only science but also art. Obviously, this kind of aesthetic appreciation of the remarkable colors and sculptural forms of that sort of terrain, I think has in our time, especially probably in the last fifty or sixty years, sort of elevated this kind of landscape to being one of the iconic ones of the West.

00:34:33
Speaker 3: You mentioned art, and in this piece you highlight how women artists have really been leading figures in depicting these landscapes.

00:34:46
Speaker 2: And is.

00:34:49
Speaker 3: There a connection there between them being overlooked and underappreciated and then leaving space for someone like Georgia O’Keefe to bring them to a new audience.

00:35:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s an interesting phenomenon. I haven’t thought really hard about why, for example, men might have been drawn to certain kinds of terrain and women to this particular one.

00:35:17
Speaker 2: But when I began putting together.

00:35:20
Speaker 1: The historical stories about bad lands appreciation, about painters and photographers who had become sort of famous for doing work in the bad lands, I began to realize, Wow, it’s an extraordinarily large number of women, as opposed to say, I mean, there are certainly some great women painters of the Rocky mountains. But many of the appreciators and painters of the Rockies tended to be men. So there’s something about this landscape, and I think the fact that it lacks utility but has a kind of an arresting beauty may have been one of the things that drew women. And so Georgia o’keeith clearly is the pre eminent person that one can give credit to for having popularized bad lands in our time. But I mean, as I mentioned in this piece, there are a bunch of other women who play a major role. Mary Austin with her book Land of Little Rain back at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of my favorites is Evelyn Cameron, that British expatriot who lived with her naturalist husband outside Terry, Montana, and who in the years from about the eighteen eighties through about nineteen fifteen or so, photographed endlessly photographed all that country around Terry. And as I mentioned in the script, one of the sort of fascinating things about her and her husband is that they not only were intrigued by the wildlife of eastern Montana, but they had this thing where they would capture young coyotes, in one instance two young wolf pups and raise them up as pets. And so they are all these remarkable photographs of of Evelyn and her husband with these various animals, all kinds of raptors, predatory raptors, and coyotes and wolves in particular.

00:37:26
Speaker 3: And I think in this piece you highlight the sort of very unique esthetic qualities of western badlands. There’s layers of color, there’s strata of geology, and then there’s these shapes that don’t see quite seem to make sense.

00:37:48
Speaker 2: You know.

00:37:49
Speaker 3: I think of being out in eastern Montana and you see these washes that sort of go down in waves, and.

00:37:58
Speaker 2: Can you sort of speak to how I mean.

00:38:01
Speaker 3: I know that you’re a big fan of this being in this country, but it does elicit a very different sort of emotional and intellectual response than you know, a big granite peak.

00:38:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does.

00:38:13
Speaker 1: It’s as Georgia O’Keefe said about the Red Hills the bad lands around her place outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, it’s a marvelous place to climb around in and it’s that kind of country. It’s very human scale.

00:38:30
Speaker 2: Bad lands.

00:38:30
Speaker 1: Mounds are most often not more than thirty five to fifty feet high, so they’re fairly easily scalable and climbable. And it’s a kind of a landscape with rhythm and symmetry to it along with color and sculpture that I’ve found for most of the time i’ve been in the West really arresting. I mean, I’ve, as I mentioned in that script, I’ve made long pilgrimages in order to see particular bad lands country that I hadn’t spent time in, and and I’ve done it repeatedly just because I’m moved by that kind of terrain. It’s kind it’s got a granular kind of surface tactile feel to it, but it’s mostly a really visually compelling.

00:39:25
Speaker 2: Kind of landscape. And and I.

00:39:27
Speaker 1: Think that is probably why it drew so many photographers and artists. As Georgia O’Keefe said, I mean, she said, I don’t have to invent these paintings. I just paint what’s there. And here it is with all this arresting grace and rhythm to.

00:39:44
Speaker 3: It, and there’s a there’s sort of a timelessness that we associate with with like a mountain peak. Obviously there is a history there, but when you’re in bad Lands country, you can see time and history right in front of your face. And it’s almost like you could go back there and visit the next year and see what’s exposed now in terms of just you know, artifacts and bones and fossils and things like that.

00:40:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:40:11
Speaker 1: Well, I mean one of the great national parks built around bad lands in the West is a petrified forest in Arizona. I mean, it’s a bad lands, but it is endlessly exposing fossils and petrified wood, and so yeah, that’s another to me. Part of the appeal of a place like that is that every time you go things have changed.

00:40:33
Speaker 2: I mean, these.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: Clay mounds are pretty friable, and so they can be altered by weather, even the weather of two.

00:40:42
Speaker 2: Or three years.

00:40:42
Speaker 1: If you get a lot of rainstorms, it will change the way they look. So unlike say a granite peak that pretty much remains the same throughout your lifetime, this is country that is changing at a pretty interestingly rapid rate.

00:41:04
Speaker 3: And I think at least in Montana, there’s this It connects us to a story that’s millions of years old. When you think about the Great Inland Sea. Oh yeah, I mean there’s there you look at the landscape and you think to yourself, this hasn’t always been this way, right, like you’re on a seabed, and it sort of brings into relief that long history of environmental change.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a lot of the bad lands in Montana are from the old, the ancient inland sea that extended all the way from the Gulf across the continent and right through Montana. So yeah, that’s one of the things that that I think you get to do when you’re walking around or hiking, backpacking and country like this, as you do get to imagine these kind of vast sweeps of time, and you know that’s that’s part of the appeal of.

00:42:03
Speaker 2: The West for sure. Well, Dan, thank you, how you bet, Randal, Thanks m