Kachina Point

Kachina Point is an overlook on the red part of the Painted Desert, about two miles from the park’s north entrance and immediately behind the Painted Desert Inn. An easy, accessible path reaches the rim. It’s a strong stop on a north-end drive if you want the wide badland view without taking on a hike.

The view opens across layered red, cream, green and dark badlands, with rounded ridges, mesas and distant buttes. Give the near ridges a look too; the color bands and eroded shapes are easy to miss if you only scan the horizon. For a phone photo, keep some of those closer hills along the bottom of the frame so the panorama has depth.

Most of the Painted Desert’s colorful formations here belong to the Chinle Formation, laid down by rivers more than 200 million years ago in the Late Triassic. The colored bands are ancient soil layers. Iron and manganese minerals are part of the story: where groundwater levels changed and iron oxidized, soils turned red; higher, oxygen-poor water tables helped preserve green and blue tones. The stripes are a record of very different conditions beneath this landscape long before it became desert.

The Painted Desert Inn sits directly behind the overlook, so the stop has a human-history side as well as a landscape one. It began as Herbert David Lore’s Stone Tree House, built of petrified wood and native stone before 1920 and registered in 1924. The National Park Service bought the property in 1936; Civilian Conservation Corps crews rebuilt the inn to architect Lyle Bennett’s Pueblo Revival design, and it reopened in 1940.

After the Fred Harvey Company took over in the late 1940s, Mary Colter updated the interior and Hopi artist Fred Kabotie painted murals with scenes including the Buffalo Dance and Tawa, the Hopi sun god. If the museum is open during your stop, step inside to see them; the building became a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

The accessible overlook approach is separate from the one-mile round-trip, unpaved Painted Desert Rim Trail between Kachina and Tawa Points. It crosses rim woodland, and its surface and waterbars can make it unsuitable for strollers and mobility devices. Kachina Point also has a separate trail into the northern wilderness area.

Parking, benches, a picnic table, drinking water and a flush restroom are available at the overlook. In summer, the nearby inn has a downstairs ice-cream parlor; the Painted Desert Visitor Center is the separate stop for food and gas.