Boneyards in the Badlands

The Uncompahgre River valley, southwestern Colorado, a couple Halloweens ago. In answer to my question, the boys at the public lands office said, "Mancos shale." What a cool name. It was Eastwood's name in his second Spaghetti Western. It was this rock that made the western Colorado Badlands bad.

Mancos shale results from silt. It suffocates the roots of plants; thus few plants grow out here, and hardly any critters. Not even crypto-biotic soil. Only an occasional prairie dog or scavenger would try to make a living here.

It's not like I'm complaining. Instead of standard tourist scenery, I prefer scenery that has a strong flavor of any kind, even the horrific. There is more drama in it. It is more evocative of life and death struggles. Maybe I've bought too many postcards from Nietzsche, over the years. 

Well this is the place for it -- the Badlands between Montrose, CO, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The complexion of the ground was that of a corpse. Pallid hills rumpled up about 200 feet high. Imagine a woman with the comeliest curves, and the shabbiest skin complexion--say, Morticia, of the Addams Family.

A glutton for punishment, I pulled into the main staging area of the motor-crazed yahoos, intending to boondock for the night. (It was virtually in the shadow of a cell tower.) The BLM's sign named the trails: Dump Ridge (overlooking the town landfill), Skull X Bones, Monster Ditch, Moonlight Mesa, and Nighthorse Trail.

What really attracted the gasoline-besotted yahoos was the "open" status of the Badlands: they didn't have to ride on trails. They could commit wanton destruction to their heart's content, except that there wasn't anything left to destroy. The sterile ground was tensile-cracked and salt-encrusted. The landscape was harsh and lunar.

Here in the Badlands I saw a type of beauty to the otherwise hideous sport of motor-crazed yahoo-ism. Thomas Hardy, the author of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", would have called it "a negative beauty of tragic tones."

The only animal life visible were the crows that patrolled the town dump by toying with the ridge-lift from the hills. (Aren't Badlands always windy?) They were all that was alive, yet they cared only for morsels of fresh Death. This was all becoming a little weird, like I was stuck in a BLM version of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Just then a pickup truck approached. Alongside it, a large Chocolate Lab ran his heart out. What a creature, so healthy and joyous! He came up to inspect my little dog, and then spirited off.

There could not have been a creature more out of harmony with its environment than this lab; and what a relief it was to see! But there was another contrast with the grisly environment: at the foot of these hideous badlands, rich fields begin:

 
It was getting close to dusk when I winced at the approach of six motorcyclists, about a half mile away, who were silhouetted on a sinuous ridgeline. When one of the two-cycle engines would scream, an adjacent ghoul would roar in response, and moved to catch up with the other. It was as if they were holding hands and doing le Danse Macabre on that darkling ridge, like the classic finale in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", when black-shrouded Death finally wins the chess game and leads his victims off:

And Happy Halloween to my readers!