Badlands National Park - South Dakota
“The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.”
Badlands National Park is in the southwestern part of South Dakota and got its name from the Lakota people who called the spot “mako sica'“ or “bad lands.”. Early French-Canadia trappers also referred to the area as “les mauvais terres pour traverse” or “bad lands to travel through.” President Franklin Roosevelt established it as a national monument in 1939 and it became a national park by an act of Congress in 1978.
The park covers 244,000 acres and is the largest protected mixed grass prairie in the United States. The formations are made up of sedimentary rock and are a result of erosion and deposition (layers of sand, clay, and dirt that have been deposited and cemented together over time).
If you don’t have much time at least drive the Badlands Loop Road. It’s 39 miles and will take about an hour. There are turnouts where you can pause and take in the view or very short trails you can walk if the weather isn’t too hot.
Coming across this landscape after the green rolling hills is a bit of a shock. The spires and canyons, colors and textures, are so very different from the green rolling plains. It’s stark and beautiful, almost an alien landscape set down in the middle of nowhere. If you get a chance sunset is a perfect time to visit Badlands National Park. Watching the colors change on the rock formations, transitioning from warm to cool, is a magical experience.
We saw countless deer, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs with the plague, buffalo, birds, and one snake. I’ve never seen so many deer in one place. I didn’t know there were this many deer in the world let alone within a certain area. It seems as if all the deer in the world live in South Dakota. Maybe when you visit you’ll get to see a larger variety of wildlife!
