Badlands National Park, Scenic

This is a stop I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I’ve seen tons of pictures and have read quite a bit about the place and couldn’t wait to see it for myself. We arrived about 7 (after gaining an hour mid-drive with the switch to Mountain time, something I had totally forgotten about), plenty of time for some superficial sight-seeing. We drove around a bit and then parked at one of the lookouts, watching the sunset. We got back in the car and drove around a bit more, stopping at one point on a remote gravel road, to join several deer in watching the sun come down over the prairie/Badlands.

I won’t really try to describe the Badlands or go into any of the geological details about how/why they are formed. No time/space/imagination/vocabulary/understanding for that. In the mean time, a 1998 NYT piece described them thusly:

"The Sioux called them 'mako sica'; early French trappers referred to areas as 'les mauvaises terres' -- both mean 'bad lands,' a place where erosive forces have eaten deep into soft soils and formed a wild landscape of improbably shaped hills and ridges, useless for all human endeavors save gazing upon....The formations, some more than 1,000 feet high, were distinctly striped, like the walls of the Grand Canyon, with occasional bands stained brick red where iron-rich soils had oxidized. The slopes were cracked like an elephant's skin, and fragile-looking. It appeared that collapse was imminent. Geologically speaking, it is. The badlands is one of the world's most rapidly changing landscapes: on average the formations lose an inch every year, but new badlands are forming as the old ones melt away. Within 500,000 years, however, they will be completely gone. Rivers flow out of the badlands clogged with silt -- 'too thick to drink, too thin to plow,' as one homesteader expression put it."

The shape of each formation, their unfamiliar texture, the weird plants/trees/grass that grow in their midst, the colors and the vastness of the landscape, and the harshness of it all, are otherworldly. The Cliffs of Moher, in Ireland, is the only natural sight that I’ve seen firsthand that compares at all to the sheer physicality and spectacle of the Badlands.

Sunset was stunning. Pinks, purples, oranges, reds, and yellows, on display, and as you can imagine, the Badlands make for a peerless canvas. Surprisingly, we were largely alone and able to enjoy the sight in relative quiet. Couldn’t help but feel particularly small, insignificant.

Driving through the park, where Badlands line each side of a winding road for about 25 miles, was magnificent. I can’t wait for tomorrow morning, when we’ll walk among them, touch them, experience them up close.