Painted Desert badlands along the rim, Arizona, 1939

About this postcard

The view looks across the Painted Desert from its rim, where rounded, banded hills in red, orange, ochre, and blue-grey recede toward a low mesa under a pale, cloud-streaked sky. Sparse desert scrub grows in the foreground wash. The printed caption describes an uninhabitable desert of multi-colored sands that changes color through the day and with weather, lying 800 feet or more below the rim and 14 to 40 miles wide. By the late 1930s, motorists on the highway between Gallup, New Mexico, and Holbrook, Arizona, could take in these views from the rim, and the desert stretches on toward the Grand Canyon country.