FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO ROCK

BALANCING ACT

AH-SHI-SLE-PAH WILDERNESS, NEW MEXICO, USA

“The Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness can feel like an alien planet, with its strange shapes, colours and lack of vegetation, ” says Stan Allison, of the Bureau of Land Management Farmington Field Office. The hoodoos – irregular columns of rock – dotted around the landscape also help create that otherworldly quality.

Hoodoos are a lesson in differential erosion: the stronger sandstone resists the erosion that acts on the softer surrounding rock to create spires and precariously balanced capstones. Elsewhere, the ground is so soft that rain cuts vertical sinkholes into hills, carving mazes of ravines and gullies.

The Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness is also home to fossilised turtles and crocodiles – a lurking reminder that the parched desert was a humid swamp only 75 million years