Blue Mesa Overlook

Blue Mesa Overlook is a viewpoint on the spur road through the park’s central badlands. From the mesa top, you can see rounded hills striped in blue-gray, lavender, purple and pale peach, with hoodoos and dry washes beyond. I’d make the drive even if you skip the walk: the overlooks show the bands without a hike.

Blue Mesa Trail is a separate one-mile loop that starts by the sun shelter. It begins with a steep descent, alternates paved and gravel sections, and winds among bluish bentonite hills and petrified wood before climbing back to the rim. The return is exposed, with little shade; visitors repeatedly mention the uphill climb. The shelter area also has parking, benches, a picnic table and interpretive displays beside the trailhead.

The broad rim views show how the colored ridges meet the wider Painted Desert. Frame one of the ravines rather than only the horizon; a petrified log in the foreground can give the hills scale where one sits within the view. Expect plenty of gray and lavender alongside the blue-green tones, not a uniformly blue landscape.

The Blue Mesa Member is a thick layer of Late Triassic mudstone, about 220–225 million years old. The ancient soils turned blue-green where a high water table kept oxygen low; where the water table shifted, iron oxidized and left red tones. Those changes in the rock are still visible in the bands below the overlook.

The mesa is capped by the younger Sonsela Member, about 216 million years old. Its lower Rainbow Forest bed is pale sandstone and conglomerate that holds petrified logs. The Blue Mesa Trail also passes wood and fossil-bearing sediment layers. Leave the petrified wood where it lies.