The Badlands

After traveling over miles and miles of vast grasslands, we entered South Dakota's Badlands National Park.  The provocative name comes from Mako Sika (bad land), the name given to the area by Lakota Native Americans.  Mounds of sedimentary rock have eroded into amazing canyons, ridges, spires, and buttes that constantly transform in varying light and seasons.  Eroding at about an inch per year, the Badlands are ever changing and mystical.

We arrived knowing that this was our last official stop on our odyssey before turning south for home.  Visitors to the park had dwindled so much that only five other groups were staying in the only open campground.  It has been surprising to see how many places have closed as October nears.  

Our campsite was shaded by a lone cottonwood.  Oz looked small against the vast horizon.  The wind blew mercilessly, so we opted to ditch the awning rather than trying to stake every corner.  

I felt melancholy and thwarted.  Somewhere between Yellowstone and Roosevelt, my favorite camera lens contracted some sort of malfunction.  After limping along for several days, it finally gave up the ghost and no longer speaks to the camera body.  One of the memory chips is also malfunctioning, leaving me with less than 100 available shots remaining unless I do some serious deleting.  I have tried to keep duplicates of the best photos in case of a crash.  As a result, my computer's memory is so chocker-block full that I am having to download from the camera directly to a back up hard drive.  Besides missing a ton of photo ops with the lens issue, it now takes me three times as long to set up a blog post... even with decent internet connections... lessons learned for future adventures.

For the moment, however, I had no idea how I would take photos of landscapes without the short lens... or work with the memory issue if we had abundant wildlife.  As it turned out, the landscape was vast enough for the "big gun" and wildlife was limited to the now usual deer, bison, and prairie dog.  We laughed at how discriminating I have become since the beginning of the trip when even a lousy shot of a bear felt worth keeping.

The visitor center movie provided an excellent introduction to the geology and history of the Badlands.  Boosted by the information, we loaded up the camera gear and took our evening wildlife run.  We found a bison scratching his belly and a small herd of big horn sheep.  In prairie dog town, a coyote was hunting the area.  He scooted over the hill as we neared.  We spied him, hiding in the grass below us.  

As the sun danced its ballet on the horizon, however, the Badlands began to shimmer in shades of yellow, rose, and blue.  Shadows played off ridges and valleys.  The symphony of shapes and colors filled us with awe and wonder yet once more at God's creation.

Throughout this adventure, it seems that I rarely was able to capture the landscape, particularly with all the rain.  It was something that I always wanted to share with you, even though it is almost impossible to do justice to the vastness and beauty of any panorama.  The Badlands at sunrise and sunset is among the most impressive.  Here is my feeble attempt to offer a glimpse of its remarkable geography.

Black Hills and Badlands on Dwellable