Ep. 24: Getting Over the Color Green and Learning to Love Badlands | The American West

In the 20th century peculiar landforms dismissed earlier in western history with the denigrating term “badlands” became compelling locations for scientists and artists in the West. First passed over as economically worthless, these barren, colorful landscapes were translated by painters like Georgia O’Keeffe into iconic imagery. Now many are national parks and wilderness areas. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  taxes and fees. 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 Florys, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Getting Over the Color Green and Learning to Love Badlands.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Out on the southern high plains, low down in the formations of a famous panhandle canyon called Palo 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'Keeffe, first saw this canyon when she was a young art teacher in west Texas during World War I, and always thought the common name her young guide used for the Spanish Skirts, "Badlands" is what he called them, was a peculiar miss of appreciation.

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  O'Keeffe 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 develop a proper appreciation for a landform once dismissed as useless ground taking up good space on the planet.

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  What O'Keeffe first saw in west Texas in 1916 were 240 million year old Permian age clays and mudstones eroded by wind and water into horizontally banded mounds. The Spanish Skirts aren't a large landform, standing at most 25 feet high, but if your eyes are moved by color and sculptural form, as O'Keeffe's obviously were, in the right light, the Spanish Skirts can take your breath away. An initial impression is of scooped Neapolitan ice cream, plopped down blobs of earth consisting of layered stripes of different colors, at least seven different hues altogether.

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  The bottom base of a Spanish skirts mound is in the pale tangerine of Palo Duro's canyon floor. Above that is a second layer, sometimes demarcated by thin horizontal stripes of white gypsum of a dark burnt hookum horns orange. Above that are again slender ivory bands, finely 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.

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  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 frothed 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'Keeffe was fixated by their earth art. On several hikes in the 19-teens, while the rest of the world was distracted by stories of trench warfare and poison gas in Europe, O'Keeffe was becoming seriously dazzled by Palo Duro Canyon earth art.

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  "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 Politzer, "She couldn't get over the colors and shapes of this canyon and 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 color green, O'Keeffe never recovered from her fascination with barren, eroded badlands.

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  When she returned to the West in 1929, she at once sought out New Mexico cliffs and Badlands that reminded her of Palo Duro and the Spanish skirts. Finally buying a seven acre ranchette at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs northwest of Santa Fe, for the next half century, she endlessly painted the Badlands. Ignoring the inclination of homesteaders to regard Badlands as sterile, bad places to farm, or of religious types who liked to name western geologies after Hades and Satan, O'Keefe called her favorite Badlands "The Red Hills", "The White Place", "The Black Place".

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  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 Badlands 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 plains, a horizontal yellow terrain of overlapping arcs of grasslands extending westward nearly 500 miles to the foot of the Rockies. There are mountain uplifts, many of them individual ranges like the Wasatch or the

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  Bitterroots, within a larger framing of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, all those uplifts with one exception, the Uintas in Utah, running north and south through the continent. There is a vast canyonlands etched into the Colorado Plateau, a coastal rainforest in the Northwest. There are true deserts of shrubs and cactus, some hot zone deserts, others cold deserts of extensive sagebrush steppes.

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  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 naple ultra-arid 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. The West's 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

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  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

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  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 "mauvettes terre," Badlands,

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  because they presented so few inducements, essentially none, for a European looking to settle the country.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  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

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  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

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  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,

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  Argentina, New Zealand, Taiwan, in the Danxia formations of China. Badlands, we now realize, tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history.

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  For travelers moving across North America from east to west, as was the case for Americans in the 1800s, 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 19th century, almost everywhere the edges of mountain ranges, canyon defiles, or sweeping plains erupted into exposed Badlands, 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.

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  In the United States, the work that turned Western Badlands into a mecca for paleontology began in 1849, when Dr. 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 de Verheiden, intensively sought out the West's Badlands to dig fossils. In the post-Darwin era, Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh was stimulated by a stirring Thomas Huxley lecture in New York in 1876 to assemble a chronology of horse evolution

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  that became the principal evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. These days, Jack Horner and other modern dinosaur scholars still ply the Badlands for major discoveries from the continent's remote past. We've gotten a version of this in the opening scenes of at least half the Jurassic Park movies. Badlands are still the primary target of the modern dinosaur hunt in the United States, Canada, and China today.

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  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 Badlands he'd explored that they were, as he put it, "a desert to the agriculturalist, a mine to the paleontologist, and a paradise to the artist." As usual, Powell got it exactly right. While scientific investigation came first, and is still underway, for the past hundred years it's been artists, photographers, hikers, and simple lovers of landscape who have turned these once malign landforms into scenery appreciated for its sensuousness and aesthetics. Badlands are like the Western deserts in that respect. But you have to admit,

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  it took someone like a Georgia O'Keeffe or an Edward Abbey to make the rest of us begin to pay attention.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Badlands' reputations may have begun to change for some Americans even before O'Keeffe began to paint, though. About a century before our time, with homesteading of much of the West almost over and the automobile 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 1899, explorer Robert Hill descended the Rio Grande River in west Texas through future Big Bend National Park, the story of which he published in Century Magazine in 1901. "It took Hill nearly a month of constant familiarity

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  with sights like 'vermillion foothills of red clay,'" as he wrote, "before the adjectives 'weird,' 'repulsive,' 'spiteful,' 'bizarre,' and 'sterile' finally dropped from his verbal palate, replaced with some grudging admiration of form and color." But eventually, with a lot of practice, Hill did begin 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 Badlands, an early break from the dismissive place they had occupied in landscape aesthetics in the 19th century and earlier. It's interesting and worth some reflection, I think, that with a landform that offered

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  no economic possibilities, whose lure for some was scientific but for most aesthetic, a disproportionately high number of women emerged as admirers of Badlands scenery. Hill was initially followed by the literary naturalist John C. Van Dyke, who wrote marvelous descriptions of the grand Badlands of Death Valley in his early 20th Century volume, The Deserts. But it was Mary Austin who emerged as a California rival to Van Dyke as an early promoter of a Badlands aesthetic, providing an American desert appreciation that even prefigures Ed Abbey's with her book, The Land of Little Rain.

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  Then there was the unlikely British expatriate photographer Evelyn Cameron, delighting through her viewfinder at the Northern Plains Badlands near her Terry, Montana ranch. Cameron also became a devoted lover of Badlands 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 19-teens and 1920s.

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  Cameron was followed on the Northern Plains by the North Dakota artist Zoe Beiler, whose paintings of the almost-science fiction landscapes along the Little Missouri River were attracting attention to both the place and the artist by the 1920s, a decade before O'Keefe's Badlands oils would take the New York art scene by storm.

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  When Georgia O'Keeffe'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 artist must possess some psychological scar that frightened her of water. Of course, that wasn't it. In the 1930s, two decades after seeing Palo Duro and the Spanish skirts, after years of life as Alfred Stiglitz's model and artist-wife in New York, O'Keeffe bought a small ranchette at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs and turned her work from flowers toward the hot-colored Badlands and cliffs around her home.

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  She found the curvilinear 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, Badlands are an especially fine place to climb around in," she exclaimed.

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  "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 muse 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: Peternal and the Red Hills from 1936, Red

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  Hills and Bones from 1941, The Gray Hills 1942, and The Black Place 3 1944. And so O'Keefe told her friends Rebecca Strand and Arthur Dove after finding and buying her Ghost Ranch home, then moving to New Mexico full-time following Stiglitz's passing, "I am west 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 100 miles from the railroad, 68 from Santa Fe, 18 miles from a post office, and it is good." I wish you could see what I see out the window.

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  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. Pink 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.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  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 badlands country, badlands have slowly progressed from denigrated or just ignored western 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,

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  Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. There are also numerous badlands state parks. Mika Shika in eastern Montana for one, Toadstool Geological Park in Nebraska for another, Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, and even a sizable number of official federal wildernesses like the Ojito Badlands and the Bisti 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's badlands have somehow acquired

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  an audience of admirers in the last hundred years. So it's probably clear enough that I'm Badlands smitten myself. I'm powerfully drawn to Badlands 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 rails 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

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  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 bistec ardeazin Badlands wilderness of northwestern New Mexico. I've had Badlands adventures in Teddy Roosevelt National Historic Park in North Dakota, where

• 26:48Speaker 01

  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 Moxichica 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

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  Badlands and Waimea Canyon, an unexpected slice of the arid West in the middle of the Blue Pacific.

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  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

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  receding and approaching elemental earth forms barren of obscured 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 Luhann 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

• 29:05Speaker 01

  once walked through yet another Badlands locally known as the Painted Desert. This one on the northwestern edge of Big Bend National Park. It was a cloudless morning in June. Big Bend is as far south in North America as you can get and still be in the United States. And at that latitude, June means searing 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 78 degrees, but my thermometer read 92 by 9 a.m., 98 by 11, and 108 shortly after noon.

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  By that point, my body felt like a bag of mostly water the blast furnace Big Bend's Painted Desert desperately wanted to reduce to raisin form.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Wandering half-lost in that astonishing Badlands, 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 had to remind myself at 1:30 PM that five hours in a sauna is more than enough. The heat bug screeching of cicadas in the tamarisk thicket where I'd parked my Jeep guided me back to shade and safety. But even on a 112-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.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  My ultimate Badlands 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 Parts 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 headlights part. The accident? I discovered eventually that Steven Rinella, who at that time used the same production company Bourdain did, was behind the scenes of that phone call.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  The Parts Unknown shooting schedule was crazy. They had five days to film seven scenes, and since Bourdain 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 mic'd 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 2 Hatch Chili's and fell speechless.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  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 had 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 Lohan had written about. At the time, I must have been paying attention, but later, all I could recall was nudging

• 32:48Speaker 01

  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 gonna be hard to top. I still dream, though. I even dream of Mars, our solar system's ultimate desert, with red canyons 25,000

• 33:27Speaker 01

  feet deep, and Badlands, such Badlands, on a scale beyond earthly. The gods, but what would an O'Keefe do with Badlands like those?

• 33:43Speaker 07

  So Dan, in this episode, you're talking about Badlands, 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 Badlands are sort of a landscape that we think of as 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 Badlands as a global geological phenomenon.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  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 canyon lands or plateaus that often produce badlands 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

• 35:07Speaker 01

  two or three years ago, that is filmed in the Danxia 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 it 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

• 35:50Speaker 01

  or 80 years. I mean, this has become kind of the target sort of landscape for the dinosaur hunt around the world. And that's, that's primarily why is because the Badlands are mostly composed of these really old mudstones and siltstones that have been exposed more recently, but that date back to the times before 65 million years ago.

• 36:13Speaker 07

  And if you'd asked me where they find dinosaurs, I would have told you Montana, the Hell Creek Formation.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 07

  And then I would have said Mongolia.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 07

  And I could have described to you the landscape that they're found in Mongolia, but I wouldn't have. Labeled that image in my mind as Badlands, but that's exactly what it is.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And so it's a, 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, the sense that Badlands in the 18th and 19th 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 shade.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  It didn't have mineral deposits. Hence, these early descriptions referred to those kinds of places as Badlands. But 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 50 or 60 years, sort of elevated this kind of landscape to being one of the iconic ones of the West.

• 37:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, and you mentioned art, and in this piece, you highlight how women artists have really been leading figures in depicting these landscapes. And is, is that, is there a connection there between them being overlooked and underappreciated? And then leaving space for someone like Georgia O'Keeffe to bring them to a new audience?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon. I haven't, you know, thought really hard about why, for example, men might have been drawn to certain kinds of terrain and women to this particular one. But when I began putting together the historical stories about Badlands appreciation, about painters and photographers. Who had become sort of famous for doing work in the Badlands. I began to realize, wow, it's an extraordinarily large number of women as opposed to say, I mean,

• 38:53Speaker 01

  there are certainly some great women painters of the Rocky Mountains.

• 38:58Speaker 07

  Right.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  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 that drew women. And so George O'Keefe clearly is the preeminent person that one can give credit to for having popularized Badlands 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 20th century. And one of my favorites is Evelyn Cameron, that British expatriate who lived with her

• 39:44Speaker 01

  nationalist husband outside Terry, Montana, and who in the years from about the 1880s through about 1915 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 this thing where they would capture young coyotes in one instance, two young wolf pups and raise them up as pets.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  And so there are all these remarkable photographs of Evelyn and her husband with these various animals, all kinds of raptors, predatory raptors and coyotes and wolves in particular.

• 40:38Speaker 07

  And I think in this piece, you highlight the sort of very unique aesthetic qualities of Western Badlands.

• 40:51Speaker 07

  There's, there's layers of color, there's strata of geology, and then there's these shapes that don't quite seem to make sense. You know, I think of being out in eastern Montana and you see these washes that sort of go down in waves and, and can you sort of speak to how, I mean, 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.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. It's, as Georgia O'Keeffe said about the, the Red Hills, the Badlands 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, Badlands mounds are most often not more than 35 to 50 feet high, so they're fairly easily scalable and climbable. And it's a, it's a kind of a landscape with rhythm and symmetry to it, along with color and, and sculpture that I've found for most of the time I've been in the West, really

• 42:09Speaker 01

  arresting. I mean, I've, as I mentioned in that script, I've made long pilgrimages in order to see particular Badlands 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 of, it's got a granular kind of surface tactile feel to it. But it's mostly a really visually compelling kind of landscape. And, and I think that is probably why it drew so many photographers and artists. As Georgia O'Keeffe said, I mean, she said, I don't have to invent

• 42:51Speaker 01

  these paintings. I just paint what's there. And here it is with all this arresting grace and rhythm to it.

• 42:58Speaker 07

  And there's, 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 Badlands 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.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, one of the great national parks built around Badlands in the West is Petrified Forest in Arizona. I mean, it's a Badlands, 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. I mean, the, these clay mounds are pretty friable and so they can be altered by weather, even the weather of two or three years. 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,

• 44:06Speaker 01

  this is country that is changing at a pretty, interestingly, rapid rate.

• 44:12Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 44:17Speaker 07

  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.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 07

  I mean, there's, there, you look at the, the landscape and you think to yourself, this hasn't always been this way, right? Like, you're on a, you're on a seabed and it sort of brings into relief that long history of environmental change.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a lot of the Badlands in Montana are from the old, the ancient inland sea that extended all the way from the Gulf across the continent and, 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 in country like this, is you do get to imagine these kind of vast sweeps of time. And, you know, that, that's part of the appeal of the West.

• 45:16Speaker 07

  Yep, for sure. Well, Dan, thank you.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Oh, you bet, Randall. Thanks.

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