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Rapid City, SD → Badlands National Park → Rapid City, SD 168.0 mi (270.4 km) |
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Good morning, South Dakota!
Today, I am up and at ’em, eastbound to the final national park on my adventure in the Mount Rushmore State. Before heading into a place as ominously named as Badlands National Park, though, I needed to stock up on supplies. I could think of nowhere more appropriate than the outlandishly advertised Wall Drug in the quirky town of Wall!
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Wall Drug is more like a town of its own with a mall, museums, art galleries, and all kinds of oddities surrounding it! But it started as a long shot investment in 1931 by Ted and Dorothy Hustead! For the first five years in Wall, the “geographical center of nowhere,” it was a real struggle to get customers, but just as they were about to give up, they realized if they put up signs promising ice water to thirsty travelers, they’d get some to stop! Sure enough, after pausing to wet their whistles, those westbound adventurers found themselves in need of more supplies, and a destination was born!
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Today, Wall Drug still gives out free ice water, sells cups of coffee for 5 cents, and serves up absolutely enormous sticky buns in their Western Art Gallery Restaurant, home to the Hustead family’s collection of 500 original works of art by folks such as Harvey Dunn and Gutzon Borglum!
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Sadly, most of the huge attractions were locked up for the winter, like the giant T-Rex, but I was able to glimpse Wall Drug’s famous giant jackalope through the bars of the fence! In summertime, this place is absolutely hopping with cars, buses, and throngs of folks, but today, the lingering snow kept it peaceful. I think jackalopes thrive in peaceful areas.
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In fact, Wall, South Dakota is home to the world’s largest jackalope! It’s 40 feet tall and made completely out of wood! It’s the work of Jarrett and Jordan Dahl, whose other chainsaw art shops I spotted in Deadwood and Keystone, and it really lent a truckload of mythos to this town of roadside attractions!
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And speaking of mythos, near the famous 80-foot dinosaur that’s advertised Wall Drug since the 1960s, I found a patch of snow! It was just enough to resurrect Señor Castorieti after a brief snooze. Since I last saw him at a schoolhouse, he suddenly yelped that he was missing class! I said it was okay, that we were on a field trip, and true to form, as he ran to get a closer look at the dinosaur, he tripped on the field and splatted face-first into the gravel. Poor Señor Castorieti! I’ll have to build him back up when I find a safer spot.
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Maybe that spot will be inside Badlands National Park! There wasn’t much snow to be seen, but there was some! That didn’t matter so much, because I was serenaded by some very familiar whistles. All around the entrance sign was a huge prairie dog town, just like the ones I’d seen up north in Theodore Roosevelt National Park! These were just as busy gossiping, arguing, and grazing on grasses, all the while keeping their keen eyes on the skies for any signs of danger!
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Whoa! I was completely unprepared for my first view of the badlands at Pinnacles Overlook! Roosevelt National Park had some beautiful cliffs, but these jagged formations stretched for miles! This whole area started building up 75 million years ago as sandstone and other rocks piled on top of a base of Pierre Shale. 500,000 years ago, the Cheyenne and White Rivers started carving it all away, and it’s estimated that within the next 500K years, this area will all be flat!
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For ancient humans, who lived among the Badlands, they weren’t all bad. In fact, they used these sharp and precipitous drops as a way to hunt bison! Spooking the herd, they’d stampede them across the plain toward one of these cliffs, and then they’d harvest those that fell down and couldn’t get up. When you’re up against strong grazers like bison, you do what you’ve got to do to survive!
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As the road descended from the overlook, I was wowed by just how tall the formations were from the base! They were practically snow-capped peaks in miniature, but I sure didn’t feel like I was on a frozen mountaintop. In fact, it was downright balmy, hovering around 50˚F… in South Dakota in January!
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The road bottomed out in the Conata Basin and the 30 million year old Brule Formation! When this sediment layer was building up, this was a grassy savannah, home to such grazers as Mesohippus, Leptomeryx, and Subhyracodon, along with their predators, Nimravid, Daphoenus, and even the colossal, piglike Archaeotherium! Over 19,000 fossils from the Eocene Epoch have been unearthed here in the Badlands!
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As the road curved upward again, I beheld the Yellow Mounds, named for their Goethite-tinted crust! This was a whole new kind of fossil I’d never heard of called a paleosol! It’s as old as the Pierre Shale, but after the water drained away from here back in the Cretaceous Period, some of that shale eroded into soil, and that soil got re-mineralized! That’s why it looks so different from the shale below it!
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One of the nice things about visiting Badlands National Park in winter is that there are a lot fewer visitors and there is exactly zero chance of encountering a rattlesnake! Sure, there are still bison roaming about, and a normal winter day may be a lot icier, but a day like today made surveying the Badlands from the Burns Basin Overlook very peaceful! It might not have been so peaceful for homesteader, Wilson Burns, though, who had to find a way to raise sheep out where wells have to be dug a thousand feet deep!
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I, for one, was glad not to have to chase down any sheep along these precarious cliffs! It was tough enough staying upright in the sudden bursts of wind! But the view from Panorama Point was lovely, highlighting the candy cane stripes left by iron-rich deposits!
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And then I stopped in my tracks! Bigfoot Pass! Could it be that the hairy hominid had made it this far into the Plains, where the Lakota speak of one Chiye Tanka? I had to pull over and find out what made this pass important to Bigfoot!
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In actuality, this was a much sadder story. Here, 350 Minneconjou Sioux, led by Chief Big Foot, hacked their way down this precipitous wall on December 24, 1890 as they fled the US Army! They only made it 65 miles to the south, where on December 29th, the Army massacred Chief Big Foot and most of his people at Wounded Knee. It was the definitive end of all Sioux resistance and the loss of their ancestral homeland.
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That was some heavy history to process, so I decided to walk it off. The Castle Trail seemed long enough, and I could see that it was very similarly marked to the Painted Canyon Trail in Roosevelt National Park. I had plenty of daylight, so I set off toward Saddle Pass to see how much ground I could cover before my 5:55 flight home!
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After leaping across a few tricky streams, I beheld an odd formation that reminded me a lot of Chimney Rock in Nebraska! I could tell this would be a gorgeous hike, and I was surprised not to see a lot of footprints beyond this point. I couldn’t see why, because I was near to taking off my hat with the warmth!
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Except I did not prepare for this hike! I lost sight of the trail markers after the third one, and the snow was lightly covering muddy streams of indeterminate length! I was slipping, sliding, and getting more and more lost, which if I kept it up would definitely make me miss my flight home!
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So I rebuilt Señor Castorieti! Surely the snowbeaver would know how to navigate me back to the parking lot from here. And sure enough, he did! He pointed back behind us and said “There.” So we walked together back the direction we came, and as I leapt across the first stream, I realized too late that I hadn’t given Señor Castorieti very strong legs at all! His leap sent him headlong into the muck, and his body dissolved immediately. Poor Señor Castorieti!
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But his directions had been sound, and I made it back to the road, got my passport stamp at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, and decided to check out two final stops on my circuit of the park. The first would be the Window Trail!
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To be honest, I couldn’t tell that this was a window! I always thought of geological windows as holes, like at Window Rock, so when I got to the end of the boardwalk, I thought I was at the Door instead! I wandered around lost for a bit, peeking through slots in the wall, until I realized the Door Trail was much farther down!
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And so I found out that the Door was just like the window, only much, much grander! This was the kind of rugged trail I’d need to hustle down and back if I was going to get to the airport on time, assuming I didn’t run into the same trouble as on the Castle Trail. After all these years, I’ve yet to say “No” to a time challenge, and with good packing snow in sight, I headed off down the 3/4-mile trail!
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Being so far north and with the sun setting so early, the light was just lovely as I picked my way across the rocks and ravines! Here, the path was much more clearly marked by bright yellow posts with numbers on them, so even though it was rough going, I could at least tell I was on the right path!
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The further I went, the more unique the rock textures became, more like popcorn, which I suspected was because of their ancient identities as seabeds! It reminded me a lot of the rocks lining the Bruce Trail near Tobermory, Ontario!
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There was absolutely no mistaking the end of the trail, and good thing too! It ended in a sheer drop! Beyond, the Badlands continued to stretch well over the horizon, as they had before the first Lakota named it Mako Sica for bad lands, and I took a moment to consider my moment in time. This place has a lifespan of 1 million years. The youngest fossils here are over thirty times older than that! It’s been a sea, a jungle, a savannah, and now a desert, and I really wonder what other incarnations it will take on in the coming millennia! That, of course, is way more time than I have!
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So I backtracked to the trailhead and headed out of the park, bypassing the Prairie Homestead and Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, which were both closed for the season, it turned out. That meant I arrived at the airport with ample time before my very not-crowded flight and smooth sailing all the way back to LAX. You might say it wasn’t a bad landing!
Get it?!
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Total Ground Covered: 760.0 mi (1,223.1 km) |
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