One of the most striking formations along the fantastical clay hills of New Mexico’s badlands collapsed over the last few weeks after rounds of damaging storms brought billions of gallons of water to the state’s northwest corner.
Situated on Navajo lands near the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness, a low-lying region near Farmington, N.M., about 180 miles northwest of Albuquerque, the structure was nicknamed the Alien Throne for its otherworldly appearance: a fusion of bony spines crowned by a lobe of ashen sandstone.
Kialo Winters, 51, who calls the region home, last saw the Alien Throne on Oct. 18 while leading a group of tourists with his company, Navajo Tours USA. Upon his return on Oct. 30, he said, the 15-foot-tall pillar had crumbled, leaving only a five-foot stump.
When he first arrived there that day he recalled thinking, “Somehow or somewhere I knew that something was wrong.”
He had just turned a corner while guiding a tour group when he noticed a break in the skyline. As he neared the throne, or Tse Binaka Niyol in Navajo, he saw, to his dismay, that it had crumbled.
“It’s a really big loss to the tourism world, to the photography world, and especially to our Indigenous locals in the region,” he said.
“They are way points,” Mr. Winters, who is Navajo, added, “important landmarks within our lore, which is part of our identity.”
He hopes that future visitors will respect the land by letting the throne “rest,” he said.
“We don’t want to take any of its remnants as tokens,” he continued. “We don’t want to dishonor the area in that way.”
The loss of unique rock formations is not uncommon in this semiarid region, which is prone to erosion.
“It’s really a quite ephemeral landscape, so come back in 100 years, and it’s going to look very different,” said Kevin Hobbs, a field geologist for the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. “To a geologist, 100 years is ephemeral,” he added.
He said rain was mainly driving erosion in the area.
Over the last two weeks, around 20 trillion gallons of rain fell in the Four Corners region encompassing southeastern Utah, southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona, Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press.
These powerful storms speed up the erosion “quite a lot,” Mr. Hobbs said. “They drive a lot of landscape change.”
Three miles south of the throne, crossing into federal land, another beloved monument, the King of Wings, also collapsed.
Its daring cantilevered arm of 12.6 feet was recently seen snapped off on Oct. 17, according to one visitor; another said it “looked just fine” earlier in the month.
The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the land on which the structure sits, said in an email that it was looking into when and why it had collapsed.
Many neighboring natural attractions remain intact.
Near the fallen formations are a clump of petrified wood logs, a nest of oval stones that resemble prehistoric eggs, known as Cracked Eggs, and the Valley of Dreams, made up of tiers of clay mounds rising up like the plumes of an eruption.
Known formally as hoodoos, these mudded huts are a familiar sight across the badlands. They form when a top stone, a much stronger piece of rock that resists erosion, overhangs a weaker columned stem, Mr. Hobbs said.
Based on the erosion patterns of local mangrove-like trees, he estimates that Alien Throne and King of Wings stood strong for roughly several decades to centuries.
That is a blink of an eye for these tumbles of strange crags molded and whittled by rain for 60 million to 70 million years, a time when the dinosaurs roamed. Dinosaur bones can still be found in the grounds of Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah and its northern neighbor, the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, which span 7,200 acres and 45,000 acres each.
A journey to either of these terrains requires a sometimes treacherous seven- to eight-mile hike from the nearest parking spot, said Tori Myers, who runs local archaeology tours.
The formidable heat of summer makes the fall a more hospitable time to visit, but the rains can quickly turn the pure clay roads into “quick sand,” she said. “People have lost full vehicles,” she added.
What makes up these extraterrestrial-like formations — the backdrop to at least one film — is clay, shrinking and swelling and sponging up rain.
This makes them moldable but also “inherently fragile,” Mr. Dobbs said. “Then you get relatively high intensity rain events,” and — snap.
“It is quite common for rockfall events to come in the days and weeks after episodes of prolonged or heavier than normal precipitation,” he said.
A chunk of Landscape Arch in Arches National Park in Utah plummeted to the ground in 1991. A 100-foot section of bluff fractured from a plateau at Dotson Point in Sewanee, Tenn., in 1994. And the granite face of the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire was forever lost in 2003.
“People tend to get really sad” about the loss of the ethereal beauty of such places, Mr. Hobbs said. “But it is a natural process,” he added. “It’s kind of like the death of a very old tree.”
“Their only fate is to one day collapse,” he said. “But I take solace in knowing that as erosion continues, another one is going to weather out of a cliff, and there will be a new one for my son to see someday.”
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