South Dakota - Day 3 - Badlands National Park

Badlands KOA, Interior

Tuesday, 3 August 2021

today's route

I drove through the national park twice - first soon after dawn heading north to Wall, and again after 1:00 on the way south again.  The difference was startling.  In the morning I saw wildlife everywhere; on the way back I saw almost none.

As I'd found at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in ND, the entrance gate isn't staffed early in the morning and I drove right on in.  The scenery was stunning.

The mountains seemed to advance and retreat as I drove along.

At a viewpoint area, I found 2 Big-horned Sheep.  And a family that was being held hostage because the sheep were grazing right by their car.  The sheep weren't in any hurry to move along, so the family had to practice patience too.  I mean, you can watch the sheep for a while, but after a bit you'd have to be a biologist to keep being fascinated because the sheep were just grazing.  Slowly.

First, I saw this one and took the photo from a distance so as not to disturb it.

Then I realized it wasn't disturbed by me at all and moved closer for this photo.

Then I saw this one appear.

And then I realized I could get both of them in the same shot.
The shadow coming from the lower right comes from the parked car of that hostage family.

more spectacular scenery

They don't call it a painted desert, but looking at this,
I don't know why not.

I learned that the white soil I'd noticed yesterday is sand.  You can see why Lakota Indians, French explorers, and settlers moving west and seeing this area for the first time would call it Bad Lands.  But it also has an unusual beauty.

Frank Lloyd Wright, noting he'd seen much of the world and the US, wrote, "I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands. . . . What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere - a distant architecture, ethereal . . ., an endless supernatural world more spiritual than earth but created out of it."

And in a different vein is this observation: "The prairie is not forgiving.  Anything that is shallow - the easy optimism of the homesteader . . . the trees whose roots don't reach ground water - will dry up and blow away."  It's attributed to "Kathleen Norris, Dakota."

There's a lot of history in this area.  Here's one piece of it:

This is the text in the sign below right.

This sign was at one of the viewpoints.

I saw a family of 4 Pronghorn Antelope.  Then a herd of 8, and then 4 more.  I saw a HUGE prairie dog town.  Then 5 more antelope, including a mother with her young.  Then 6 more.

I couldn't bring myself to crop those mountains
out just to enlarge the antelope.

One of them decided to cross the road.
(Why did the chicken . . .)

I saw that thing around her neck (in the middle photo above)
and wondered if she were wearing a bell.
This photo shows it's a radio collar.

Oddly, the small herd in the 1st photo here was skittish and decided to move away over the hill because of both me and that other car.  But this gal in the other 2 photos didn't seem to care about us at all.  I drove right by her and she didn't twitch a muscle.  Of course, I drove very slowly.

I got to the entrance gate at the other side of the park and saw a fat prairie dog sitting in the middle of the road.  When I came up to it, it decided to head back and waddled - seriously - back to the edge of the road.

Just outside the gate I saw some bison crossing the road, and some idiot bikers (who don't deserve to be in the gene pool) had gotten off their bikes to film the bison.  It doesn't seem to matter how many news items are published about people being seriously injured by wildlife in general and bison in particular, people seem to believe that only happens to somebody else.

I drove the fairly short distance from the park to the town of Wall, pop. 818.  Best known for Wall Drug.  I felt about Wall Drug like I did about Mt. Rushmore - I wasn't much interested but I'd heard about it forever and now that I was in the neighborhood . . .

Except I was far from being the only one in the neighborhood.  It wasn't even 8:30 AM and the town was already packed.  It seemed crazy to me.  I mean, it's just a commercial establishment.  A very large commercial establishment - it takes up an entire city block - but nonetheless that's all it is.  I would still have gone in, but the closest I could park was 2 blocks away, the day was already getting warm, and I just didn't want to do it.

Instead, I parked in the city parking lot and stayed for the next several hours, enjoying getting an internet connection, which I couldn't pick up at the campground.  The campground has spotty cellphone reception, too, and say they're down in a bowl and people should climb the hill beside the campground - which gives you an idea of the situation.

After a while, I turned on the generator so we could have some air conditioning and kept trying to get some work done, taking the dogs out for a couple of short walks.

Finally, we went on back down the park's road - I had a get-in-free card with my senior pass to national parks - and found a different scene entirely.  The colors that had been so clear in the morning were all washed out.  There were prairie dogs out but almost no other animals.  What there was plenty of, though, were people.  Lots and lots of people.  I'm guessing they saw what I did and wondered why this place was such a big deal, having no idea at all of what they'd missed.

It was going on 2:00 when we got back to the campground.  I wouldn't have missed this morning's drive for anything.  A truly remarkable place.