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The Alien Throne

Alien Throne stands in the Valley of Dreams, a remote field of hoodoos on Navajo Nation land in the northwestern New Mexico badlands. It’s filled with petrified wood — even petrified trunks and branches — and is rich with fossils. It’s just outside the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness, where paleontologists discovered not the Triceratops, but the Pentaceratops. Alien Throne is a hoodoo. They’re formed by erosive forces like wind, rain, and flowing water beating away at stacked layers of soft and hard rock. The softer layers wear down relatively quickly, but the harder layers resist for longer — eventually, we’re left with impossible shapes. Hoodoos tend to have hard “cap rocks” on top, which protect the soft layers, and alien features, below.

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Uploaded on October 9, 2023
Taken on October 7, 2023