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Out on the southern high plains, low down in the formations of a famous panhandle canyon called Palo Duro that gives rise to the Red river, there's a landform some long ago imaginative appreciator named the Spanish Skirts. One of America's internationally famous artists, Georgia o', Keeffe, first saw this canyon when she was a young art teacher in West Texas during World War I and always thought the common name her young guide used for the Spanish Skirts Badlands is what he called them was a peculiar miss of appreciation. O' Keeffe didn't know it then, but in another two decades she was going to be in a position to help other Westerners, Americans who loved interesting landscapes and much of the world develop a proper appreciation for a landform once dismissed as useless ground taking up good space on the planet. What O' Keeffe foundation first saw in West Texas in 1916 were 240 million year old Permian age clays and mudstones eroded by wind and water into horizontally banded mounds. The Spanish Skirts aren't a large landform standing at most 25ft high, but if your eyes are moved by color and sculptural form, as o' Keeffes obviously were in the right light, the Spanish Skirts can take your breath away. An initial impression is of scooped Neapolitan ice cream plopped down blobs of earth consisting of layered stripes of different colors, at least seven different hues altogether. The bottom base of a Spanish Skirts mound is in the pale tangerine of Palo Duro's canyon floor. Above that is a second layer, sometimes demarcated by thin horizontal stripes of white gypsum of a dark burnt hook, em horns orange above that are again slender ivory bands finely drawn as if with white ink. Then come the Latina fireworks in succession there is a broad swipe of deep lavender purple, then another of a saffron yellow, then those two finished off by an unexpected and quite wonderful band of coffee bean chocolate. Where the Spanish Skirts emerge from the canyon slopes as freestanding mounds, the final flourish is often a cap of creamy white atop the chocolate, like frothed milk floating on the surface of a latte. I've walked among the Spanish Skirts in slanting reddish morning light and in the glow of yellowed sunset air, and I understand why. Georgia o' Keeffe was fixated by their earth art. On several hikes in the 1910s, while the rest of the world was distracted by stories of trench warfare and poison gas in Europe, o' Keeffe was becoming seriously dazzled by Palo Duro canyon earth art. Everyone else hated the western high plains, she said. Everything was horizontal and yellow rather than green like the East. But as she told her friend Anita Pollitzer, she couldn't get over the colors and shapes of this canyon incised into the plains. It's absurd the way I love this country, she wrote. Lucky for those who appreciate the art of landscape, and especially lucky for those of us who are drawn by the uniqueness of Western scenery in a United States that has had a hard time getting over the color green. O' Keefe never recovered from her fascination with barren, eroded badlands. When she returned to the west in 1929, she at once sought out New Mexico cliffs and badlands that reminded her of Palo Duro and the Spanish Skirts, finally buying a seven acre ranchette at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs northwest of Santa Fe. For the next half century, she endlessly painted the badlands, ignoring the inclination of homesteaders to regard badlands as sterile, bad places to farm, or of religious types who like to name Western geologies after Hades and Satan. O' Keeffe called her favorite badlands the Red Hills, the White Place, the Black Place. For decades she offered the art of a graceful, sensual, color saturated Western landform to America and the world. It was an art that helped change the perception of badlands forever. Thomas Jefferson may not have known this, although Lewis and Clark's descriptions helped, but we all understand today that the American west is a region of many diverse landforms and ecologies. The west is made up of extensive prairies and plains and a horizontal yellow terrain of overlapping arcs of grasslands extending westward nearly 500 miles to the foot of the Rockies. There are mountain uplifts, many of them individual ranges like the Wasatch or the Bitterroots, within a larger framing of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, all those uplifts, with one exception, the Uintas in Utah. Running north and south through the continent, there is a vast canyonlands etched into the Colorado Plateau, a coastal rainforest. In the Northwest, there are true deserts of shrubs and Cactus. Some hot zone deserts, others cold deserts of extensive sagebrush steppes. But if one of the grand characteristic traits of the west, making it an exception to green America is aridity, lovers of the region ought to be especially intrigued by its Nepalu ultra arid landscape. This is the West's presentation of exposed geology, where chlorophyll green often does not appear at all in favor of an earth colored something like Mars. These are the places Old Worlders named badlands. The West's badlands are actually an array of distinctive landforms. They don't occupy a single region the way the Rockies or the Sonoran Desert do, but tend to erupt from the edges of these larger divisions in eroded lowlands of the plains, or at the feet of the soaring cliffs of the Colorado Plateau, or in the foothills of mountains in the deserts. Particularly in contrast to the West's mountain ranges with their forest and snow caps, the as their name implies, badlands long suffered from a spin problem. On initial encounter, they obviously lacked appeal for primates who require water, wood and shade to be comfortable. Even more problematic during western settlement, badlands offered little or no promise of economic possibilities. Lacking exploitable minerals, trees, even grass, people from the green countrysides of northern Europe or the eastern half of America reacted to badlands as a kind of worst version, desert antithesis of everything normal and desirable. As for actually conferring the descriptor bad on badlands, it seems to have been the French who first cast those aspersions when their explorers encountered them on the northern plains. They called the sterile multicolored mounds they found there Mauvais Terre badlands because they presented so few inducements, essentially none for a European looking to settle the country. Badlands take on a great many forms and colors, but like the Spanish skirts, the classic version is an undulating set of variably striped clay or shale mounds. They're often found in conjunction with other geology harder sandstones with narrow slot canyons, spires and hoodoos, upright pedestals capped with a stone that's preserved the clay column beneath. Smooth and curving with swirling connected hemispheric mounds. Classic badlands throw up while shadowing when hit with low angle sun. Their particular drama of shadows and light must have made little impression on people looking for a home. But there was an aesthetic drama there, and ignoring it wouldn't prevail forever. The creation of the west badlands goes back to sediments, ultimately existing as shales, clays and mudstones that precipitated to the bottoms of river, lake and ocean shorelines 10,000 to 240 million years ago. So stretches of badlands are often a geological gift of exposed Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic and Permian soils and rocks. In some badlands, the striped 35 foot mound in front of you may preserve deposits that took 45 million years and several geologic periods to deposit, which is why there can be such a variety of different colored soils. Because they were created from the shorelines of bodies of water that existed millions of years ago, and because water and wind erosion have laid them bare as landforms, badlands, everywhere in the world tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history. In fact, it was as scientific laboratories that badlands first emerged as an exciting and important landform destination in the West. Everywhere in the world, they're found, in fact. The Middle East, Spain, Tuscany, Peru, Argentina, New Zealand, Taiwan, in the Danzia formations of China. Badlands, we now realize, tend to be treasure chests of ancient life history for travelers moving across North America from east to west, as was the case for Americans in the 1800s. And Badlands first cropped up in places like West Texas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, then emerged in scattered locations from New Mexico to California. They draped the whole bottom half of Utah and appear as far north on the plains as Montana and Alberta. In the 19th century, almost everywhere, the edges of mountain ranges, canyon defiles or sweeping plains erupted into exposed badlands. Paleontologists found them to be crucial to for the fossil discoveries that took Darwinian evolution from theory to fact, which made them a peculiar scientific destination in the United States. The work that turned western badlands into a mecca for Paleontology began in 1849 when Dr. John Evans explored the Dakota badlands and published a scientific article on their possibilities. From that point, a wide range of luminaries like Yellowstone park advocate Ferdinand Vandiver Hayden intensively sought out the West's badlands to dig fossils in the post Darwin era. Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh was stimulated by a stirring Thomas Huxley lecture in New York in 1876 to assemble a chronology of horse evolution that became the principal evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. These days, Jack Horner and other modern dinosaur scholars still ply the badlands for major discoveries from the continent's remote past. We've gotten a version of this in the opening scenes of at least half the Jurassic park movies. Badlands are still the primary target of the modern dinosaur hunt in the United States, Canada and China today. Post Civil War American explorer John Wesley Powell, who saw and wrote more about the west than anyone else of his time, said prophetically of the badlands he'd explored, that they were, as he put it, a desert to the agriculturalist, a mine to the paleontologist, and a paradise to the artist. As usual, Powell got it exactly right. While scientific investigation came first and is still underway, for the past hundred years, it's been artists, photographers, hikers and simple lovers of landscape who have turned these once maligned landforms into scenery. Appreciated for its sensuousness and aesthetics. Badlands are like the western deserts in that respect, but you have to admit it took someone like a Georgia o' Keeffe or an Edward Abbey to make the rest of us begin to pay attention. Badlands reputations may have begun to change for some Americans even before o' Keeffe began to paint, though about a century before our time. With homesteading of much of the west almost over and the automobile starting to make formerly dreaded and even dangerous places suddenly less formidable, badlands began a slow process of shedding their former treatment as worthless wastes. In 1899, explorer Robert Hill descended the Rio Grande river in West Texas through future Big Bend national park, the story of which he published in century magazine in 1901. It took Hill nearly a month of constant familiarity with sites like Vermilion, Foothills of Red Clay. As he wrote before, the adjectives weird, repulsive, spiteful, bizarre and sterile finally dropped from his verbal palate, replaced with some grudging admiration of form and color. But eventually, with a lot of practice, Hill did began to appreciate this new western landform as a visual feature he could admire. Robert Hill's journey and article were a kind of watershed take on badlands, an early breakthrough from the dismissive place they had occupied in landscape aesthetics in the 19th century and earlier. It's interesting and worth some reflection, I think, that with a landform that offered no economic possibilities, whose lure for some was scientific but for most aesthetic, a disproportionately high number of women emerged as admirers of badlands scenery. Hill was initially followed by the literary naturalist John C. Van Dyke, who wrote marvelous descriptions of the grand badlands of Death Valley in his early 20th century volume the Deserts. But it was Mary Austin who emerged as a California rival to Van Dyke, as an early promoter of a badlands aesthetic, providing an American desert appreciation that even prefigures Ed Abbey's with her book the Land of Little Rain. Then there was the unlikely British expatriate photographer Evelyn Cameron, delighting through her viewfinder at the northern Plains badlands near her Terry Montana ranch, Cameron also became a devoted lover of Badlands scenery. Cameron and her husband were naturalists who studied and sometimes tamed wolves, coyotes, foxes, and birds of prey from the marvelous Badlands she she hiked and photographed, and who then watched in horror as homesteaders from the east and Europe tried valiantly, but with signal lack of success, to settle eastern Montana in the 1910s and 1920s. Cameron was followed on the northern plains by the North Dakota artist Zoe Byler, whose paintings of the almost science fiction landscapes along the Little Missouri river were attracting attention to both the place and the artist. By the 1920s, a decade before O' Keeffe's Badlands oils would take the New York art scene by storm.