Some friends and I made another trip into the amazing Bisti or De-Na-Zin badlands in Northwest New Mexico. We backpacked in and spend the first night exploring the area. We had planned on taking more photos the second night but that was cancelled due to a good rain that stopped in making the entire place really wet and muddy. I’ll go back again soon. Aside from that, I put together my first time lapse and included it below. Its OK, but I’ll need to revisit my process in making the time lapse and joining the scenes, etc.

The area that includes the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness was once a riverine delta that lay just to the west of the shore of an ancient sea, the Western Interior Seaway, which covered much of New Mexico 70 million years ago. The motion of water through and around the ancient river built up layers of sediment. Swamps and the occasional pond bordering the stream left behind large buildups of organic material, in the form of what became beds of lignite. At some point, a volcano deposited a large amount of ash, and the river moved the ash from its original locations. As the water slowly receded, prehistoric animals survived on the lush foliage that grew along the many riverbanks. When the water disappeared it left behind a 1,400-foot (430 m) layer of jumbled sandstone, mudstone, shale, and coal that lay undisturbed for fifty million years. Sandstone layers were deposited above the ash and remains of the delta. The ancient sedimentary deposits were uplifted with the rest of the Colorado Plateau, starting about 25 million years ago. Six thousand years ago the last ice age receded, and the waters of the melting glaciers helped expose fossils and petrified wood, and eroded the rock into the hoodoos now visible. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisti/De-Na-Zin_Wilderness