Badlands National Park and Wall, SD
Saturday, September 24th, 2011August 20th
We awoke to a nice sunny day, refreshed and ready for our next visit…this time to Badlands, a national park about 100 miles east of where we were staying. After leaving the Black Hills, we took an unremarkable highway through vast prairies. We were at the edge of the Great Plains which covers almost half of the continental U.S. We made a quick stop at an old nuclear missile site, another relic of the Cold War. This one had been decommissioned and now serves as a museum. Shortly after, we arrived in the Badlands, named by French trappers who had difficulty crossing this unusual landscape.
The Badlands consist of a giant wall, around 100 miles long, which divides the land into two vast plains, one significantly higher than altitude than the other. It’s no surprise that the trapper, Native Americans and later the American settlers had difficulty crossing this land. From a distance, it looks like a collection of sand castles with rain-carved spires. We took a scenic road which follows the wall. There were plenty of turnouts and nature trails to get different perspectives of the landscape. When we stopped at the visitors’ center we were impressed as usual with the extremely informative displays about the geologic history, fossils of animals that lived there millions of years ago and more contemporary history, notably about the settlers who came as part of the Homestead Act. The U.S. government sponsored a program to settle the west which gave tracts of land to settlers who inhabited and worked it for a minimum of 5 years. The extreme conditions in this region led to the failure of many of these adventures. Eventually following the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the U.S. government repurchased this land from the homesteaders and turned it in to a national park.
Before leaving the park, we made stop in a Prairie Dog City to get some pictures of the fun little burrowing animals. To complete the photo there was a herd of bison behind. The final stop on the way back to Custer State Park was in the town of Wall. There isn’t much to see in the small town, but a pharmacist in the early 20th century ha d a crazy advertising scheming to post signs advertising free ice water and 5¢ coffee along the highway. Today, the drug store is a veritable mini-mall of tacky souvenirs and cheap entertainment. We enjoyed an ice cream at the old-fashioned soda fountain and took advantage of the free ice water.
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