January 1, 2011
Returned to Bisti!

On Christmas Eve, we returned to the Bisti Wilderness for a week. Locals pronounce it "Bist-eye," and it'll take me a while to stop pronouncing it like "Bist-E." The Bisti Wilderness is a fantastic badlands in northwestern New Mexico that we visited for the first time in March 2009. I headed out to one of my favorite parts of the Bisti early Christmas morning. There were some nice wavy clouds overhead, but they must have extended too far to the east because they never developed any color. So, instead of taking pictures of the grand landscape, I turned my attention to intimate scenes that didn't include the (boring) sky.

My favorite image of the morning was the fan-shaped pattern in a small wash (above). The stones in the upper right provided a nice balance to the strong line in the lower left.