floyderdog blog: Ah Shi Sle Pah Wilderness Study Area

In the past couple of years, I've developed a sort of obsession with the badlands areas of northwest New Mexico. The most famous of these is the Bisti/De Na Zin Wilderness. Bisti is well-known as a photographer's paradise owing to it's crazy collection of bizarre rock formations and astounding, magical light at twilight. There is also dinosaur fossils and loads of petrified wood. It's all waiting up there for you to find if you just go wander around. There are no trails or interpretive signs or maps (although the gadget-obsessed can find GPS coordinates to various Bisti sites on the internet). I've dragged Lisa and assorted relatives up there repeatedly in recent years. While doing research on Bisti, I became aware of other badlands areas in NW New Mexico with similar rock formations to those of Bisti/De Na Zin. One of those places in the Ojito Wilderness, of which I have previously written. Another interesting place is the Ah Shi Sle Pah Wilderness Study Area located a few miles north of Chaco Canyon. From what I could glean from the internet, it seemed to me that Ah Shi Sle Pah might have even more hoodoos and other wildly eroded rock than Bisti/De Na Zin. Given my affection for Bisti, I knew I had to go to Ah Shi Sle Pah WSA soon.

I finally visited Ah Shi Sle Pah in February when my sister came to visit to leave her dog, Elsie The German Shepherd, with me for seven months while she went hiking the Appalachian Trail. Our visit to Ah Shi Sle Pah was short. It was partially snow-covered. Many of the areas without snow were wet, heavy clay. It didn't make for great hiking, although it was fairly nice down inside canyons. Our other problem is that we didn't know correct road to access the most fantastic parts of the area. We saw some nice stuff, but I found out later we really missed most of it.

This past weekend, I finally got to go back. Lisa and I took the dogs up there camping overnight. It was superlative overload, to say the least. How many different ways can you say something is cool or magical or amazing? Ah Shi Sle Pah WSA is truly very similar to Bisti/De Na Zin, although somewhat less colorful. However, it definitely has a higher concentration of mind-blowing rock formations. It also seems to have more petrified wood. Another advantage is that it is so much less famous than Bisti that it gets very few visitors. I am quite certain that some of the footprints that we saw this past weekend were those that we left with my sister two months back. We did see one other person, which was a drag, but overall, I've only seen one person there over three days of visiting. That's pretty good.

I say that Ah Shi Sle Pah is less well-known than Bisti/De Na Zin. This is true, overall, but in the dinosaur hunting world, my sense is that Ah Shi Sle Pah is king. It appears that there has been dinosaur hunting going on there since 1921 when Charles Sternberg, a paleontologist from Kansas, made some signficant discoveries there. To this day, there continue to be regular scientific expeditions to this WSA. Inexplicably, my first good source about Ah Shi Sle Pah was from a blog published by a German couple who knew of Sternberg and his work. They have some fine photos along with the best map and directions to the area that I have found. Living up to the German stereotype, they diligently published some key GPS coordinates. These came in handy eventually. Without these German's blog, I'd still probably be looking for this place. More recently, I've discovered some very interesting scientific articles which describe some of the history of the excavations that have occurred over the years at Ah Shi Sle Pah (look here and here). I wish I were knowledgeable about fossil hunting, because I get the sense that minor fossils are strewn about all over the place if you just know what you're looking for.

We arrived at Ah Shi Sle Pah early on Saturday evening in the midst of some lovely New Mexico spring gale-force winds. We struggled in the wind to set up the tent so that we could hike amongst the hoodoos deep into the twilight. We parked at the same place I parked a couple of months back with Karen and John. We eventually found out that this was the wrong place to park (I should've used those German GPS coordinates sooner!). After the tent was up, we sat out the wind in the truck for a while before we finally slogged down into the badland canyons. We worked our way down to the point of deepest penetration from the previous trip and then worked our way along for a while without seeing more than generic badlands. Then, without warning, we pushed over a random hill and found ourselves in a small nook filled with hoodoos and a 30 foot petrified tree. From that point on, we kept finding more and more hoodoos and petrified wood and the superlatives started flowing. As the sun was setting, we found ourselves a long ways from camp. We found ourselves bushwacking a route back up through maze of canyons in the rapidly fading twilight. Luckily, the moon was three-quarters full, which helped us finish the last 30 minutes back to camp in the dark. The GPS said that we'd hiked over 5 miles. Floyder hiked almost all of it, except for a few rough spots that I carried him over.

As we evaluated our hike, we realized that all of the interesting formations were farther west, which made us realize that we hadn't used the best access road. After a cold dinner, we went to sleep with a plan to stike camp first thing in the morning and move to further west. We did so in the morning spent the morning wandering through hoodoo cities and through twisiting canyons and across barren flats. There were astounding sights in all directions. We eventually stumbled into a hoodoo famous from a photo from Sternberg's excavations in 1921. By the time we found this hoodoo, Floyder was plumb tuckered out. I carried him off and on all morning. In our group picture at Sternberg's hoodoo, he looks like a freshly dead dog corpse, but believe me, he is still alive as I write this.

I want to go again.

Here are my pix. Click on them to see the large version.

Group hoodoo photo.

Lisa waves from a hoodoo.

Mushroom rock.

Floyder towers over mushroom rock.

Floyder patrols camp.

Elsie and Spook do nothing useful in camp.

Spook threatens bloody murder.

Typical landscape.

More hoodoos.

Here's a rarity: a hoodoo topped by a piece of petrified wood.

Petrified wood and hoodoo landscape.

Petrified tree.

Hoodoo scene in harsh daylight.

The same hoodoos at twilight.

Floyder gets tired.

The Sternberg hoodoo. Sternberg allegedly dug out a turtle fossil from the base of this hoodoo. Years later, another group found dinosaur femur "weathering out" right next to this hoodoo. All we found was Floyd, but he is not a fossil yet.