Interior, South Dakota.

The National Park Service calls Badlands National Park the “Land of Stone and Light.” On our visit in October 2020, the western wildfires that are plaguing us again in 2021 took away some of that light in the form of dull, gray skies. But no matter, the color of the hills and valleys in the park were nearly as spectacular.

Every image I brought home from the park captured the rugged terrain that covers over 244,000 acres. At one point, parts of the area were covered by a shallow sea. Later, winds and rivers added to the layers that are easily visible in the jagged peaks. Erosion then began working to expose the layers as the White and Cheyenne rivers created vast swaths through the valleys. The layers are visible in virtually all of the images I captured in the park on our trip through.

Interspersed with the rugged peaks and valleys are large areas of prairie. In the opening photo, and in the upper right of the photo above, those grassy plains are visible. Given the late fall timeframe and the drought conditions, the prairie grasses are a golden brown instead of verdant green as they are after the spring rains.

Some of the layers are quite vibrant in reds and golds, others less so, dominant in the gray stone color that most people associate with rocky formations.

As you might expect, hiking trails attract many visitors to the park. Ranging from 0.25 miles (0.4 km) to the 10-mile (16 km) round trip Castle Trail, you can spend an hour or five walking through the park. A complete list of available trails in the park can be found on the National Park Service page called Hiking the Badlands here.

Though we pretty much stayed on the paved Badlands Loop Road (Highway 240,) there are a couple of other paved and dirt roads to explore in the park. We didn’t see much blue sky that day, but occasionally the sun would appear through openings in the clouds and bring out the vivid layers of color in the cliffs.

The wildlife in the park ranges from the size of bison to the small ground-burrowing prairie dogs in towns throughout the park. At one point, we rounded a corner on the Badlands Loop Road and spotted a small herd of mountain goats grazing on the prairie grasses in the valley below us.

There are many pull-offs to stop and view the jagged peaks in the badlands and it is obvious why this place of such rugged beauty got its name. The native Lakota people called the area mako sica, translated into English literally as “bad lands.” Even the French trappers and explorers called the area les mauvaises terres a traveser. My high school French (and the Badlands National Park website) tells me this translates to bad lands to travel across.

I invite you to click on any of the images above to pixel peep in 2K HD and to view all seventeen images I processed and shared for you to view on my Flickr site. You can go directly to my Flickr album page here.

As this is being written, Lynn and I are preparing for another autumn trip through the west. I expect to gather another year’s worth of images from the western states. Invite your friends to follow along on our journeys. I always appreciate your thoughts in the comments, so feel free to tell us about your journey through Badlands National Park.

John Steiner

Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

On our first trip to the park in western South Dakota, I was impressed at how much different this badlands looks from the badlands I have seen many times just a few miles across the North Dakota border. The Lakota Sioux named this area Mako Sica. Literally translated, “Bad Lands”.

Early settlers found the terrain challenging. In wet weather, the clay becomes slick in some places, sticky in others. The canyons and buttes makes any trips through the area circuitous, and the hot, dry summers leave whatever remaining water sources unsafe to drink.

About the photo: Captured with my Samsung S20U, the 12,000×9000 pixel original image was a much larger area of a section of jagged rocks. The advantage of so many pixels is that I easily cropped the image to focus on the two highest points with a remaining image of over 7100×4100 pixels. As usual, basic edits were accomplished in Adobe Lightroom with finishing touches applied in Luminar 4. The resolution was reduced further for publication here, but you can still get a closer look by clicking on the image to check out details, if your browser supports the function.

John Steiner