Painted Desert
Arizona’s banded badlands between the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest
Spanish explorers with Francisco Vázquez de Coronado named this land El Desierto Pintado in 1540, and the badlands still look freshly painted, banded in lavender, red, orange and gray. The Painted Desert sweeps about 120 miles (190 km) across northeastern Arizona, from near the eastern end of the Grand Canyon southeast past Holbrook and into Petrified Forest National Park. Its colors come from the soft mudstone, siltstone and shale of the Triassic Chinle Formation, laid down about 225 million years ago, whose iron and manganese compounds stain each layer a different hue.
Because the Chinle erodes so easily, the land is a maze of bare hills and washes where rain runs off rather than soaking in, revealing petrified logs and fossils of early dinosaurs and their relatives. Volcanic ash in these layers supplied the silica that turned fallen trees to stone. Much of the desert lies on the Navajo Nation, where it is known as Halchíítah. The most visited section is the northern unit of Petrified Forest National Park, where the Painted Desert Inn overlooks the badlands.