Painted Desert badlands view, Arizona, 1935

About this postcard

The view looks down from the rim over the Painted Desert in northern Arizona, where eroded hills and buttes show bands of yellow, green, red, and orange. The printed caption calls it an uninhabitable desert of multi-colored sands, rock, and petrified wood, with rolling hills whose black-tipped crests look charred. From above, the caption suggests, the scene resembles a "huge melting pot" left by some mighty worker of metals. The Painted Desert is a badlands region of the Colorado Plateau, known for the Chinle Formation's layered strata and for the petrified wood found in and around Petrified Forest National Park. The view emphasizes the bare, eroded surface and the strong color bands that gave the region its name.