Badlands National Park

Thursday July 6, 2006

We had a nice little cabin at Badlands and got a good night’s sleep and were up with the dawn. (Well, with my 7:00 am dawn, any way.) We set off for some early morning hikes, as the weather in Badlands was much hotter than we were used to up in Canada. Badlands, like Teddy Roosevelt NP, is broken into a North Unit and a South Unit. The Badlands South Unit is right next to the north, but it has very few access points, it’s on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and it used to be used by the US Army as a bombing range. (In fact they estimate hundreds of unexploded ordnances still on the land. Probably not the best place to be jumping off trail.) Therefore we stayed in the North Unit, where 99.9% of people visit. There are only a few marked trails even in the North Unit of Badlands…mostly it’s open prairie and grassland with open backcountry hiking. (i.e., you can go just about anywhere you want, the bison willing.) But we decided to start on a few of the established trails, the first being the Cliff Shelf Trail. This was supposed to be a great place to see wildlife around a small pond, but they’ve had a drought up in that area and the pond is all dried up, so there was nothing really to see. Pretty boring hike to start the day.

We then hit the Door Trail (don’t ask me why they call it that), which is a short boardwalk that leads to a bunch of mini badlands canyons. The trail ends after a while, but we kept going to explore the slots and walk a bit into the canyons. Now before I go on I wanted to do a comparison for Badlands. But before doing that, I have to tell you about a place in Brussels called Mini-Europe. Mini-Europe is just like it sounds: it’s an amusement park that showcases the great locations of Europe (Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, Coliseum, etc.), but all miniaturized versions, so you can walk around the whole of Europe in about 20 minutes. Well, Badlands is like a mini-Europe of Arches National Park, with a bit of Canyonlands and Escalante thrown in. There are all sorts of mini fins, slots, and canyons, and everything is amazing, but on a much smaller scale than we saw in Utah. I’m not sure if that comparison makes any sense to you, but it does to me. After exploring some of the small canyons we hit the 1 ½ mile Notch Trail which included a large ladder climb up and above a small canyon.

Moving along down the park we hiked up Saddle Pass, a short but very steep climb up the side of the badlands. What was amazing was that when we got to the top it didn’t drop down…it was just a climb to the top of the plain, even though it looks like we were going over a set of small mountain peaks. After getting to the top we hiked a bit over the top of the plain. We kept seeing signs to beware of rattlesnakes, but even though we walked through all sorts of tall grass and over large boulders, no snakes were found.

After that hike it was getting a bit hot, so we decided to take the Badlands Loop road and stop at a few overlooks. We went down the dirt Sage Creek Road and saw some bison and prairie dogs, but since it was so hot (and we were ready to move on down the road) we decided to leave a bit earlier than we had projected. We got on the road and drove to Sioux Falls, SD and got there around 4:00 pm. The drive was incredibly windy the entire way…if I took my hands off the wheel Rocky would have ended up in the median in about 1.2 seconds. It felt like it was about a 30-40 MPH wind, and just constantly buffering our car. The wind just never stopped…I guess that’s the Plains for you. Our next stop was going to be the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Walnut Grove, MN, and it looked to be about a 2 hour drive from Sioux Falls. Unfortunately the museum closed at 6:00 pm, so we decided to find a room in the big city of Sioux Falls and head up to Walnut Grove tomorrow. So we went out to dinner, then back to the hotel for lounging, blogging, and uploading photos.

So when we were back in Banff we watched “North by Northwest” on Turner Classic (I think I mentioned this before). First, it was great because there’s nothing better than that movie to kill 2 ½ hours. Second, we knew we’d be going to Mount Rushmore a few days later, which of course has a huge role in the movie. So it was kind of serendipitous. Then, the day before we were at Mount Rushmore we went to Devils Tower. As everyone knows, Devils Tower plays a huge role in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. When we were there I was thinking, “I haven’t seen that in a while, maybe we should buy the DVD and watch it on the laptop.” That didn’t happen (the gift shop outside the monument wanted $30 for it!), but guess what did: We get to the hotel tonight and Sage is flipping channels, and Sci-Fi is showing it! If we end up seeing “Badlands” or “Field of Dreams” after, then I might start thinking some other powers are at work.