(David) Northwest New Mexico has no large cities, just the Colorado Plateau with its vast spaces and scant population.

Ancient peoples left their mark near the Rio Grande, and many of their descendants make their homes among the wonders of the earth.

Gigantic Cabezon, El Mal Pais Lava Field, Shiprock and the Rock Sculptures of the Bisti Badlands.

(Announcer) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

Additional funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Laura and Arch Brown and by the Guilford Fund.

(David) The Rio Grande splits New Mexico north to south.

About 35 million years ago, the land west of the Rio Grande began pulling away from the land to the east, forming the Rio Grande Rift zone.

As a result of the stretching, the crust thinned to the west, allowing huge amounts of lava to issue forth.

The results are spectacular.

This is a lava flow right at the edge of the Rio Grande.

It's part of Petroglyphs National Monument.

The basaltic blocks here, the lava blocks, have had time to develop what's called a desert varnish.

That patina, a kind of strong resinous surface.

It's ideal for creating art.

There are themes of water, themes of hunting, themes of game, very important to people.

The representations of perhaps mythological human beings.

The Park Service has documented about 35,000 individual examples of rock art and the lava flow is 17 miles long.

So it's a long way.

So somebody had to do that counting.

And there are varying ages, varying origins.

You have to remember that in terms of written languages, they had not yet arrived in the Rio Grande area.

There were-- they were certainly prominent in southern Mexico at the time, but instead of being able to write, they could communicate through the symbols that they carved.

This was an important source of communication, both in terms of old stories, new stories, and perhaps even information.

The youngest volcanoes probably did not occur until about 3000 years ago.

So there were not not many people living here at that time.

But they certainly could see the works of that black rock, the basalt everywhere.

We see here things that we can try to interpret.

There's a snake, probably a rattlesnake, which is very important symbolically, perhaps an antelope.

There were antelope in here that were highly valued for meat.

There are some kind of bird and then there are combination of images that are both human and animal at the same time.

The enormous volcanic plug is called Cabezon, the big head.

It towers over the countryside.

The top is about 1500 feet above where we're standing.

It is a volcanic neck.

It is actually a part of the funnel where magma shot out of the earth into the sky.

There are other volcanic necks around here, or perhaps a dozen of them.

Not as big as Cabezon.

Geologists tell us that if we look at the scratching things on the side of the mountain, those vertical scratches, those are called columnar basalts.

Those are indicative of a very, very thick bed of lava surrounded by huge amounts of soil, stone or earth, making the volcanic material cool very slowly.

And as a result, those octagonal basalt columns stand out today, like almost nowhere else around here.

Much of it is material that has been shed off the mountain itself.

And gradually, as the mountain has eroded, little pieces drop down on it.

And the part that was there has been washed away into the Rio Puerco.

It made an enormous mound around the cone itself, probably several miles wide.

This is a side drainage of the Rio Puerco, the Pork River.

It drains a large portion of the Navajo Indian Reservation and other areas upstream from the area around Cabezon Peak.

The Colorado Plateau in the upper reaches of the Rio Puerco was very rich in uranium.

And during the 1950s over 500 uranium mines were dug in that area.

In 1979, a very large retaining pond full of radioactive waste breached and hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive liquid spilled into the Rio Puerco.

The massive lava flows of El Mal Pais are related to Cabezon to the north, but they form a multilayered river of stone that covers hundreds of square miles.

El Pais National Monument is a strange combination of the sedimentary layers, cliffs and rock of the Colorado Plateau.

Mal Pais in Spanish means bad lands or bad country.

And they call it that because in a valley where the cliffs are on one side, an enormous lava flow began perhaps 30,000 years ago and various flows have continued over the eons.

The people who live in this area and have for eons are to the east, Acoma people who live in the pueblo of Acoma, to the north west Navajo Indian Reservation.

They haven't been here as long, but immediately to the West and the Zunis who have been here for thousands and thousands of years.

The lava flowed for miles and miles, 30 to 40 miles continued and flow after flow over a period of perhaps 25, 30,000 years, it continued.

The people have probably been here at least 4 to 5000, and so they would have seen some of those lava flows and it just became part of their life.

The older parts of the lava flow have been around so long that plants have been able to successfully colonize them.

Here we can see the pines, the piñones, junipers, or even some Douglas firs growing out there.

Just to the east, that plateau becomes part of the Acoma Indian reservation.

The area right here is about 7000 feet there, a little bit higher.

So it was a very cold area.

But the Acoma people who have been there for thousands of years learn very well how to build their pueblos, tolerate the cold, enjoy the heat and raise their crops.

In addition to producing some of the finest pottery around.

This trail has been used for thousands of years.

It doesn't look like it, but we're walking on top of the lava flow.

The Zuni Pueblo is to the west of us 20 or 30 miles, and the Acoma pueblo is probably about ten miles behind us.

This trail connected them.

They had a lot of commerce between them, as well as probably social connections to the North, were the Hopis.

The trail could be affected by a lot of rain or snow.

The ancient ones built cairns, these mounds of rock.

And here you can see the basalt that flowed down the lava flow.

This is maintained actually for the Continental Divide trail.

Something I haven't seen before is a piñon pine and a juniper growing right together.

Piñones, also, you have to be very careful, touching the bark because it is so full of pitch.

But that pitch was a great coating for waterproofing baskets, for waterproofing, anything, for filling in holes.

This particular tree is a terrific source of juniper bark, peels off easily, doesn't hurt the tree in the slightest, but the tree actually lets it peel off its kind of protection against woodpeckers and any anything that might try to burrow in there.

But it is the most useful fiber.

You can weave baskets, you can weave mats, you can crumpled up and use it for bedding.

I█m standing on the top of Dakota Sandstone, which is younger than any found in the Grand Canyon.

But that wide valley was the perfect place for numerous lava flows.

Came out from the north, a couple from the south even, and many of them came out from Mount Taylor.

Mount Taylor is flow after flow after flow of lava, explosions, cones.

It has been going on for perhaps 10 million years.

But this lava in here is no more than 30,000 years.

And part of it is only 3000 years old or even younger.

It is so young that trees haven't had a chance to become established in it.

Along this stretch of New Mexico, I have on my right the Santa Fe Railroad.

I have the old highway across and then way to my left, Interstate 40, with its ongoing cascade of traffic, there are hundreds upon hundreds of lava flows, volcanic necks, volcanic cones, volcanic craters all along here.

And the highway and railroad builders must have had a very difficult time cutting through all those lava flows and wondering, is it going to start again?

Shiprock is a solitary presence emblematic of the Colorado Plateau.

It too, is a remnant of an ancient volcano.

It stands almost 2000 feet above the plain from which it erupted.

It is the remnants of an enormous volcano out of its base are radiating huge dikes, part of the volcanic field that tried to make it through the surface and could not.

The story of how Shiprock came to be is most unusual.

It's part of the Navajo volcanic field.

There are between 90 and 100 such structures in New Mexico and Arizona, and there are even a couple of them in Utah.

The volcano that erupted here about 27 to 30 million years ago is made up of magma that shot through several thousand feet of sedimentary rock in the Colorado Plateau and exploded at the surface, radiating from the base of Shiprock are what are called dikes, these monstrous looking creatures that run straight out from the base, one of them six kilometers long.

Make it look like an enormous spider from space.

It is a long crack of lava that couldn't make it to the surface but remained a few thousand feet below.

It was very hard rock.

And over the millions of years, as the surface eroded, it was exposed.

If we look at them, we see they are very hard rock and they're very, very narrow.

We have to imagine what force, what colossal power could produce, the lava that would stretch the rock and split it kilometers down and ooze that lava not quite to the surface, but close enough to where when it was eroded away, we would get to see this glorious exposure of a razor in the Shiprock area on the Colorado Plateau.

There█s no other mountain like it, and the native peoples in this area believe it should be viewed as a very, very special place.

The Bisti Wilderness features some of our continent's strangest geological formations.

In the Navajo language, Bisti means a large area of shale hills.

It is that and far more.

The wilderness itself covers almost 50,000 acres.

It is surrounded on most parts by the Navajo Indian Reservation.

One unusual feature of this wilderness, The Bisti wilderness, is the lack of trails.

If we were to come back in a week, either the wind or an upcoming rain would erase all those traces.

So there's no point in making trails here.

And because of that, you can easily get lost.

The formation people call hoodoos.

They are occur whenever there is a tough rock sitting upon material that's softer below and the wind and the rain and the snow and blow in and gradually carve away the softer stuff and the harder stuff will stay on top until it becomes so unstable that it will fall over.

As we can see, these things have.

The Chuskas are a very long, 45, 50 mile long range that are actually like a plateau.

They're part of a massive uplift that occurred between 80 and 40 million years ago.

And they make for a perfect orientation point.

So wherever you have those Badlands, South Dakota, Arizona and now here in New Mexico, it's because there were certain layers of sediments laid down that were fairly soft but had a strangely different chemical composition.

And over the eons, as perhaps lakes, rivers or seas came in, went out, came and went out different sediments of different composition, laid down different chemicals in them, and each one and as it gets eroded and subject to the atmosphere or even more rain, gives a different color, the different colors, the different resistance you see in the rock layer upon layer, it looks to me as though you've got a little coal outcropping here and actually is probably very soft coal.

And this is we could actually yeah, we can actually burn this.

As a matter of fact, there are a number of places on the Navajo Indian Reservation where there's a lot of coal and people have used it for fuel for hundreds of thousands of years.

And this is the heritage of erosion.

It is completely above us completely here up to that point removed the orange rock, but there is where it came from.

But it was a lot closer 10,000 years ago, probably where I'm standing.

It was the orange rock on a hillside and maybe even farther out there.

The place is going fast.

This place is called the Rock Gardens.

It's as though the rocks have been planted here and some of them are growing here.

We have mushrooms, for instance.

It's a it's a the garden of mushrooms.

And this this guy is protecting something that ultimately will fail and it will topple over.

But for now, the mushroom is intact.

Here's another one.

Here's a bigger one, Here's a medium size and here's a tiny one.

So this is perfectly named.

It's a mushroom garden, part of the rock garden.

And if we look up there in the distance, very high up on top, we can see the rock where this rock came from.

The boulders that have been rounded indicate that they've come from a long distance and water has rolled them to produce the rounded shape.

But these up here that are still sitting on top of a pedestal, these have been here a long time, bigger pieces and haven't been rolled, at least not very much.

This area is not far from the Rock Garden, but it's called on the maps, The Valley of Bones and these are strangely rounded bones, if we look carefully, can see how part of the rounding occurs as the boulders get closer to the surface from erosion and they are stuck together.

This is uncanny.

Well, this is a fairly large hoodoo, and we can see that apparently a piece of the hard sandstone tumbled down a hill that used to be here and the angle of the rain in the summer time comes from there and it protects its own pedestal.

So as long as it can protect it from the rain and maybe the blowing wind after a rain, it's going to stay there.

The erosion will happen.

The rock protects the pedestal, but in turn the pedestal supports the rock.

So we have what in biology you would call a symbiotic relationship between the durable rock on top and the soft sediment below.

They protect each other.

There's a message in this, and I'm not sure what it is, but it's a spiritual message.

This is a text book in geology that I'm looking at.

Here is an ancient formation, basically just mud that has never really been heavily compacted, but looks to me as though this grey little hill here was material maybe left from the mud or silt from a river delta laid down, let's say, 50 million years ago.

I'm on top of the world.

Oh, my goodness.

A wonderland of rock.

It's unfathomable how did this ever happen?

Well, you have time.

You have the right kind of rock.

You have water and wind.

You get weird stuff and it takes millions of years.

But what a result.

As the ongoing climate change and global warming affect the Rio Grande and the water supply dwindles, more and more attention is going to be directed toward the forest, the plateaus, and the mountains of northwest New Mexico.

Join us next time in the Americas with me, David Yetman Jaguars and mountain Lions are the great cats of the Americas.

They have mortal enemies, ranchers who fear they will devour their cattle and hunters who lust after their pelts.

One way to ensure the survival of the cats is to set aside areas where they are protected from hunting and to work with ranchers who are making protecting the cats worth their while.

In northwestern Mexico, this strategy is being tested.

Well, they call this Badlands for really good reason.

As I look around here, not a single plant.

And that's not because the soil won't let them grow, because the soil is so fragile that they can't take root.

They take root and boom comes the rain and they're washed away.

So this site truly is a bad one, particularly for agriculture.

If you're a plant, you want to live elsewhere.

Now we've got to figure out how we get out of here.

(Announcer) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

Additional funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Laura and Arch Brown and by the Guilford Fund.