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