Badlands National Park

The Lakota called this country makȟóšiča, "bad land", and the name stuck in every language that followed. From the rim of the prairie the ground simply falls away into a maze of pinnacles, saw-toothed ridges and fluted buttes, banded in cream, rust, pink and grey. The colours are a timetable. The lower layers belong to the Chadron Formation of the late Eocene; above them sit the pale, cliff-forming beds of the Brule Formation, laid down in the Oligocene some 32 to 26 million years ago; and the highest spires are capped by the Sharps Formation. Together they record about the last 75 million years of sediment piling up on the edge of the Great Plains, and the White River that later cut into them exposed the whole sequence in cross-section.

What makes the Badlands unusual is how fast it is changing. In bare areas the soft rock erodes at about an inch a year, a pace that is visible within a human lifetime: formations soften, gullies deepen, and new fossils are washed out every spring. Those fossils are the other reason the place matters. The White River beds hold what are often described as the richest deposits of Oligocene mammals known anywhere, the bones of mammals that roamed a warm, wooded floodplain some 33 million years ago. By the 1850s, 77 of the 84 fossil mammal species then described from North America had come from this region, and today the park runs its own fossil preparation work in public view.

Above the walls lies mixed-grass prairie, the transition between the tallgrass country to the east and the shortgrass plains to the west. Bison were reintroduced in 1963 and the herd has grown to well over a thousand animals, bighorn sheep pick their way across the steepest slopes, prairie dog towns spread over the flats, and the black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, has been returned here. The Sage Creek area in the north unit is protected as the Badlands Wilderness. The southern Stronghold District lies within the Pine Ridge Reservation and is managed together with the Oglala Lakota. The land was declared a national monument in 1939 and became a national park in 1978.

The light is the thing to wait for. At sunrise and sunset the low sun rakes across the ridges and the stripes in the rock appear almost painted; at midday the same landscape goes flat and bleached. Short trails near the eastern entrance, such as the Window Trail, lead straight in among the formations.

Getting there

The park lies about 75 miles (roughly 120 km) east of Rapid City, the nearest city. Rapid City Regional Airport (RAP) is about 55 km from the park by straight line. From Interstate 90, take exit 110 at Wall and drive about 7 miles south to the Pinnacles Entrance, or exit 131 near Interior and drive about 3 miles south to the Northeast Entrance. The paved Badlands Loop Road (Highway 240) crosses the north unit between the two and passes the Ben Reifel Visitor Center at Interior.