Painted Desert Rim Trail

From Tawa Point, the unpaved path follows the edge of the mesa, winding between shrubs and scrubby woodland. It is dirt and gravel rather than a smooth overlook path, with waterbars and short grades that steepen on a few pitches; there are no stairs. The trail averages a 6.3% grade and reaches 25.6% at its steepest point, with a cross-slope up to 16.2%. The short distance is manageable for many walkers, but this is not a wheelchair or stroller route. Dogs are welcome on the developed trail if kept on a leash six feet or shorter.

The route trends northwest from Tawa Point along ridges above the badland channels, so you keep looking into Painted Desert rather than dropping down among the formations. The view widens at Kachina Point, where broad bands of red, white, pink and gray hills fill the horizon. Tawa Point also has an accessible overlook, so if you have just a few minutes, you can still get a strong desert view without walking the full trail. Keep going to Kachina if you want the full one-mile round trip. From the Kachina overlook, include a little rim vegetation in the foreground to give the layered hills depth in a photo; stay at the established viewpoint.

These bands are more than colorful rock. The badland hills are mostly Chinle Formation, river deposits laid down over 200 million years ago. The red and green-blue colors reflect ancient soil conditions: iron oxidized where groundwater levels fluctuated, while oxygen-poor soils left iron minerals greenish or blue. Look across the ridges for the changes between those colors rather than one uniform stripe.

The Painted Desert Inn stands beside the Kachina end of the route. Herbert David Lore built it from petrified wood and native stone as the Stone Tree House before 1920, then registered it with the land office in 1924; the park acquired the property in 1936. Civilian Conservation Corps workers reshaped the building in Pueblo Revival style under park architect Lyle Bennett. Later, Mary Colter made changes for the Fred Harvey Company, and Hopi artist Fred Kabotie painted murals inside. The inn is now a National Historic Landmark. It gives the rim walk a bit of Route 66-era travel history, and a downstairs ice-cream parlor is a summer-season amenity.