“Bisti” (pronounced as “BIS-tie” by English speakers) is a Navajo word that enjoys a variety of contradictory translations.  The BLM brochure describing the area tells us that it means “badlands.”   Navajo speakers offer different interpretations.  Two Navajo-speaking summer institute Fellows offered us two different ways of considering the word—first, it means “between the hills;”  and second, it means the kind of clay found on the ground in that area south of Farmington.  We choose to add a connection for our National Writing Project site to the word Bisti.

The Bisti Wilderness area, thirty miles south of Farmington, is a distinctive geographic feature in our service area of San Juan County.  It is an area of “eroded badlands topography” and offers the most unusual scenery in the Four Corners area.  Seventy million years ago, this area was abundant with animal life and vegetation in a coastal swampland.   Today the fossil evidence is a valuable key to our planet’s past lives.  The area is filled with weathered sandstone shapes of spires and sculpted rock hoodoos.  To visitors, it seems a moonscape of these strange rock formations, with no marked trails and confusing horizons.  For many of us who live here, however, the Bisti is a symbol of our home—a complicated mixture of people, cultures, languages, and history.

For more information on our site leadership, participants, events and offerings click on Bisti Writing Project Interactive