Exploring the Badlands

Sun, Sept 3 – Mon, Sept 4…

Sunday very slow and very hot. We’re not the typical camper here. Most folks are families or fishing buddies here for their last fling of the summer – hardly anyone out of state. This afternoon we did take a tour of the dam. I enjoy dam tours for about the first 15 minutes. Then I start thinking about being 100’ under the surface of the lake, and it all gets creepy. Greg, of course, understands all the technology, so he’s always interested. (Back at Hoover Dam, though, I did have an aha moment where the whole water à electricity made perfect sense.)

We have decided to move on tomorrow (rather than Tues) so we’ll have a full day to explore the Badlands. 

General Ops Manager?

Big Bend Dam (campground lower right)

Not the state flower,
but a profitable crop.

Monday.  So glad we left today. Just a couple hours drive to Interior, SD (pop 94) where we found a shady campground w/ laundry facilities. Grabbed a quick lunch and headed for the Badlands Visitor Center (VCs always have a good orientation film, and we were not disappointed). 

Very basically, the Badlands are the result of 2 processes — deposition and erosion — over a huge amount of time. A quick look reveals well defined layers of tiny grains of sediments such as sand, silt, and clay that have been cemented together into sedimentary rocks. These rock layers were deposited over 3 separate geologic periods, the last ending about 30 million years ago. Different environments—sea, tropical land, and open woodland with meandering rivers—caused different sediments to accumulate at different times. The layers similar in character grouped into units called formations, with the oldest (logically) at the bottom and the youngest at the top. The erosion began just about 500,000 years ago when the Cheyenne River got big enough to cut through these formations. It’s also quite windy here. Today the landscape erodes about 1” each year, and it is expected that the Badlands will disappear in another 500,000 years. In geologic perspective, that’s like tomorrow.

The next couple hours we circled (and backtracked) the loop road, including a short detour to Wall Drug (more on that later). A few random pics...

(Hazy day, so some shots appear monochromatic.)

Known as "the wall," this ridge separates the upper and lower prairies.

It's a long way down...

... and a long way across.
(and even tho it looks like plenty of room for bigger
pics here, there's no room in the design program...
annoying!)

The last section we drove (about 40 miles) was gravel, but we were very glad we took it b/c that's where we saw the most animals. The buffalo, by the way, is using those wooden posts to scratch himself. A few minutes before this picture, he was w/in a couple feet of parked cars and perfectly content. There was also a couple-mile stretch that was practically overrun with prairie dogs. 

Prairie Dog
(gazillions) 

Big horn sheep (lots of these around)

(He's actually less than 10' from the edge of the parking lot. I just got a good angle
-- and then cropped the shot.)

Wall Drugs, 1931

 BlogThoughts... To fully understand my reaction to visiting Wall Drug, you really need to read its history (http://www.walldrug.com/history/since-1931). I read this to Greg after seeing a dozen or so Wall Drug signs we drove toward the Badlands. By the end I was misty-eyed and eager to visit this establishment, now operated – I assumed – by current family members carrying on the traditions of their grandparents. A tiny bit of that is true. Family members do still run a drugstore in one section of what the NYTimes describes as "a sprawling tourist attraction of international renown [that] draws some two million annual visitors to a remote town." I was sorely disappointed. The café still offers free ice water (they’ll even fill up your jug), and you can apparently still get a cup of coffee for a nickel, but I’m sure the hard-working founders would roll over in their graves and cry if they could see the current operation.

Postscript... Ironically (or maybe consequently), the homemade butter pecan ice cream I bought at the soda fountain was so odd (very weird texture, like really really thick whipped cream and not very flavorful) that I actually tossed it in a trash can. I've never, ever tossed ice cream before.