Deep in Wyoming’s Red Desert, wild horses roam a world of stone spires

Adobe Town’s alien world awaits

Deep in Wyoming’s Red Desert, there’s a place that barely shows up on most maps.

Adobe Town covers roughly 85,000 acres of wild badlands in Sweetwater County, southeast of Rock Springs, and almost nobody goes there.

The Bureau of Land Management watches over this land, but the silence mostly watches over itself. Rock spires, wild horses, dark skies.

You’ll want to go before anyone else figures out it exists.

Wind and water built this place over thousands of years

The soft rock here didn’t always look like this. Wind and water spent thousands of years carving it into towers, canyons, and wild shapes that stop you in your tracks.

Explorers who passed through in 1869 wrote down notes about the picturesque, tower-like forms.

Beneath the surface, fossils of ancient mammals, including a rhino-like creature called the Uintathere, sit locked in the stone.

Those fossil beds helped spark a fierce race between rival fossil hunters in the 1800s, a showdown history calls the Bone Wars.

Skull Creek Rim blazes with layers of color

The centerpiece of Adobe Town is Skull Creek Rim, a wall of rock that climbs to about 7,000 feet.

Walk up to the edge and you’ll see bright bands of color cut through the stone, layer after layer, like pages of a book left open to the wind.

Highly eroded drainages cut channels through the badlands below.

This is the main area the BLM recommends for exploring on foot, and it’s easy to spend half a day here without covering much ground.

Lone stone pillars rise from a sagebrush sea

North of Skull Creek Rim, the terrain shifts. In the area known as Monument Valley, single stone pillars stand up from the rolling sagebrush like they forgot they were supposed to fall over.

No crowds, no guardrails, no signs. Just you and the desert and these columns of rock rising out of the quiet.

Adobe Town Rim nearby adds more badlands formations to the mix. This corner of the wilderness is one of the most isolated pieces of public land in Wyoming.

Hoodoos, arches, and sinkholes carved into soft stone

Across the desert floor, the erosion keeps working. Towering rock spires poke up from the flats.

Hoodoos in strange shapes cluster along the canyon walls. Natural arches and sinkholes have opened in the soft stone where water wore through over centuries.

Reddish caprock caps many of the knobs and buttes, holding them together just a little longer. The maze of canyons and bluffs doesn’t have marked trails.

You pick your own way through, and that’s most of the point.

Wild horses run free across Adobe Town

Adobe Town holds one of Wyoming’s largest wild horse herds. Greys and roans are common, but the colors vary.

You might catch sight of a group moving across the badlands, their silhouettes cutting against the rock and sky.

Wild horse trails often give you the best path up toward the rim, so it pays to follow where they’ve already been.

Watching them move through this landscape, with nothing fencing them in, is the kind of thing that stays with you long after the drive home.

Pronghorn, eagles, and coyotes share this desert

The Red Desert ecosystem doesn’t belong to the horses alone. Pronghorn drift across the open sagebrush in groups.

Mule deer turn up in the draws and canyons. Golden eagles and hawks land on the high stone pinnacles and scan the ground below.

Coyotes move through in the early mornings, and small burrowing animals work the sandy soil across the flats. Elk pass through as well.

Few places in Wyoming let you see this many animals in a landscape this open and unbroken.

Morning light turns the badlands into something else

Photographers who make the long drive out here tend to come back.

The soft light at sunrise and sunset hits the layered rock and pulls out colors you wouldn’t expect, reds and oranges and pale yellows that shift by the minute.

The wide, open vistas give you real scale, the kind you can’t fake in a frame.

Add a band of wild horses moving through the middle distance, or a hawk dropping from a pinnacle, and the image makes itself. Every visit to this place turns up something different.

Hike, backpack, or ride through open backcountry

There are no marked trails in Adobe Town, which means you can walk wherever the land takes you. Rolling hills, open canyon floors, long sagebrush flats, all of it is yours to wander.

Backpackers who go deep into the wilderness earn a quiet that’s hard to find anywhere near a road. Horseback riding has always been a natural fit for this kind of terrain.

Hunting and nature study bring their own crowds in season.

What pulls most people in is the freedom, the sense that the land has no opinion about where you go.

Stars blaze from one horizon to the other

After the sun drops below the rim, Adobe Town goes dark fast. No cities sit close enough to push light into the sky, so the stars come out thick and low.

From horizon to horizon, the sky fills. The silence at night here has weight to it.

If you set up camp and stay until morning, you’ll have time for star photography that’s nearly impossible to get anywhere near a highway.

Primitive camping is allowed anywhere in the wilderness study area, so you pick your spot and settle in.

No services, no signal, no safety net

Adobe Town has no designated campsites, no water sources, and no restrooms. Cell service disappears early on the drive in.

You are on your own, which is the whole appeal, but it demands real preparation.

Good navigation skills matter in country with no trail markers and no landmarks that repeat on a map. Let someone know where you’re going before you leave.

The wilderness here doesn’t have a ranger station nearby, and it won’t come looking for you.

Load up and plan before the road turns to mud

The BLM recommends a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle for a reason. The unpaved roads that lead into Adobe Town turn to thick, impassable mud after a storm.

Bring a spare tire, a full tank of gas, and more water than you think you need.

Pack extra food, warm layers, and survival supplies even in summer, because desert temperatures swing hard at elevation. Carry a paper map and know how to use it.

The reward for all that preparation is a wilderness that still feels genuinely untouched.

Explore Adobe Town Wilderness Study Area in Wyoming

You can reach Adobe Town by taking unpaved backcountry roads southeast of Rock Springs, Wyoming, in Sweetwater County. A high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle is required.

There are no fees to enter, no designated campsites, and no water sources on site. Spring and fall are the best seasons for visiting.

Before you go, check current road conditions with the BLM’s Rock Springs Field Office and pick up a detailed map of the area. Tell someone your plan and your expected return time.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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