Spotlighting is one of my very favorite natural lighting effects, whether on land or water. Here in the less-trodden North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, layers of badlands geology are laid bare for inspection and admiration in the late-day sunshine, marvelously and warmly illuminated. Many thousands of years of erosion by wind and water—mostly water in the forms of direct gullywashing and freeze-thaw cycles that break up rock and clay—sculpted this scene. Roosevelt described these lands this way: “The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.”
16 SSW Watford City ND (12 Jun 12) Looking ESE
47.613, -103.351Badland Hills Spotlit
Spotlighting is one of my very favorite natural lighting effects, whether on land or water. Here in the less-trodden North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, layers of badlands geology are laid bare for inspection and admiration in the late-day sunshine, marvelously and warmly illuminated. Many thousands of years of erosion by wind and water—mostly water in the forms of direct gullywashing and freeze-thaw cycles that break up rock and clay—sculpted this scene. Roosevelt described these lands this way: “The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.”
16 SSW Watford City ND (12 Jun 12) Looking ESE
47.613, -103.351