There are stretches of high desert in northwestern New Mexico where Mother Nature has sculpted otherworldly forms using wind, rain and the passage of time.
Hefty planks of rock defy gravity as they balance atop spindly pedestals of clay, while some columns of sandstone take on the appearance of lace, elaborately eroded by the seasons.
Tour guide Kialo Winters shares this piece of his homeland on the edge of the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness with visitors regularly.
On a recent Friday afternoon, the founder of Navajo Tours USA rounded a bend and found one of the area’s most famous features had collapsed.
The Alien Throne — or Tsé Bináká Níyol as it’s known in his language — was no more.
His heart dropped.“It was surreal,” he told The Associated Press. “I had to sort of just pause.
A lot of things ran through my head.”The Alien Throne and the nearby King of Wings formation collapsed within weeks of each other, toppled by the very forces of nature that created them.
The southwestern US has endured major rounds of storms over recent weeks, with rain falling on ground already soaked from an especially wet fall.
Parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona have watched rivers crest and floodwaters course through usually dry washes, destroying homes, further saturating the soil and eroding the landscape.
The water is receding and cleanup is underway, but officials estimate the damage could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Winters still is concerned for relatives on the Navajo Nation, where many dirt roads became impassable or were washed away altogether by what he described as a series of massive storm fronts.Experts have estimated that more than 20 trillion gallons (75.7 trillion liters) of rain fell across the Four Corners states and Nevada during late October and early November as tropical moisture was funneled into the region.
