The Good, the Bad and the beautiful

Next on the adventures in South Dakota? We made our way from Rapid City to the Badlands. The Badlands National Park is located in southwest South Dakota. It preserves 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires.


View Larger Map

Unless you zoom in on the map, you won't see the road we drove from Scenic around to meet up with 240, but the unpaved little dirt road (called Rim Road) offered some amazing views and let us see quite a bit of wildlife. We saw many buffalo, mule deer (even a dead one), coyotes, prairie dogs, and even some white-tailed deer as well. Jackie and Baylee even got to chase a rabbit (see pic of Jackie running below - rabbit is running to the left), but not the prairie dogs - they carry plague, as in The Plague. Not for my pups, thankyouverymuch.

The Badlands Wilderness protects 64,144 acres of the park as a designated wilderness area and is the site of the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret, the most endangered land mammal in North America. (We didn't see any ferrets.) On a side note, parts of the park are co-managed with the Oglala Lakota tribe of South Dakota.

How did it get the name "Badlands?" It's widely believed that the Lakota called the topography "Makhóšiča", literally bad land, while French trappers called it "les mauvaises terres à traverser" – "the bad lands to cross." Either way, the summers in the area are very dry and hot while the winters are harsh and unforgiving.

However, the scenery was unlike anything else we'd seen thus far. And to think how different it was than the Black Hills, just over 50 miles away, it was even more amazing.

Here are just a few photos from the very drizzly, foggy day in The Badlands. Which, on another side note, is bumpy enough to knock our '98 Jeep Wrangler WAY out of alignment. We had to get it aligned the next day. Wheeee.