Alien Eggs at Bisti Badlands, New Mexico

The alien eggs at Bisti Badlands are a cluster of rounded, cracked stone formations sitting on the open desert floor in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, about 35 miles south of Farmington, New Mexico. Some people call them the cracked eggs, and once you're standing over them the name fits either way. They're what's left after erosion wore down the soft mudstone around harder channel deposits, and the speckled color comes from minerals in the rock. The whole area is an ancient badland, dry, hilly, and unlike anywhere else in the Southwest.

Getting there takes some work, which is part of why the place still feels wild. You turn off NM 371 onto a graded dirt road and park in a small lot at the edge of the wilderness. From there it's a hike of a mile and a half or so out to the eggs, and there's no trail. No markers, almost no cell service, and country that looks the same in every direction, so it's easy to lose your bearing. A GPS track or a downloaded map helps a lot the first time. You walk across dry, open ground until you drop into a little gully, and the eggs are right there in front of you.

The land is public, BLM managed, but it sits in the middle of Navajo country, so treat it accordingly: pack out everything, and don't climb on or move the formations. The best light is early and late, sunrise and sunset, when the low sun brings out the texture and color in the stone. Fall, roughly September and October, is the most comfortable time to be out there. Plan on at least half a day if you want good light, and longer if you want to explore, because the eggs are only one small piece of what's out there.

I shot this on a busy morning. I'd walked all that way into what felt like empty desert, and there were forty or fifty other photographers working the same small patch of ground, so a clean frame took some patience. I've never found anywhere else that looks like this, and I only worked a corner of it. There are probably a thousand compositions out there I didn't get, which is reason enough to go back.

See more of my landscape and night photography at imagesbyericbrown.com and on Instagram @eric_d_brown.