Painted Desert badlands view, Arizona, 1935

About this postcard

The view looks across the Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona, a banded badlands of red, orange, purple, and blue eroded hills and gullies receding to a low mesa under a pale blue sky with light clouds. A clump of desert scrub, possibly ocotillo, stands in the left foreground. The caption calls the Painted Desert an uninhabitable expanse of multi-colored sands that changes color through the day and with weather, and notes that travelers on the rim highway between Gallup, New Mexico, and Holbrook, Arizona, can look over a basin 800 feet deep and 14 to 40 miles wide extending toward the Grand Canyon country.