Alien Eggs at Bisti Badlands

The alien eggs at Bisti Badlands sit at the end of a hike, a mile and a half or so out into the middle of nowhere. There’s no trail…you park in an empty lot in the high desert south of Farmington, New Mexico, and you start walking across dry, open, hilly ground that looks the same in every direction. The land is public, BLM, but it sits in the middle of Navajo country.

For most of that walk, it stays the same. Dry dirt, low hills, scrub, the kind of country you could cross for miles without anything catching your eye. Then you drop into a little gully, and there they are. Rounded stone shapes clustered on the ground, cracked and weathered, sitting there like something laid them. People call them the alien eggs, and once you’re standing over them the name makes sense.

I’d walked all that way into what felt like empty desert, and there were probably forty or fifty other people crowded around the same small patch of ground, all of us there for the same reason. Getting a clean frame took some patience. I waited, moved around, waited some more, and eventually the crowd shifted enough that I got the shot I wanted.

The walk was worth it. I’ve never found anywhere else that looks like this, and I only worked a small piece of it. There are probably a thousand compositions out there I didn’t get. I’ll be back for them.

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