After 50 years, Gwen finally got her wish to return to a place she had seen as a child on a family road trip through the Badlands with her parents. As a 10 year-old kid from Minnesota, they could have taken her anywhere and told it was the Badlands, but she swears they wouldn't do that. The good news is the scenery hasn't changed much in those fifty years. FYI, this is our first attempt at a selfie using our new, bluetooth, selfie stick!
The place was named the Badlands because it could not be crossed by westward migrating families with the rugged terrain and lack of water. Of course, the local Souix Indians had known this for a couple hundred years, and named the place Mako Sica, or literally, land bad. Like so much about the travelling across the country, the white man had to find out the hard way. Another reason for the name of the park is all the sheep. Get it? Baaaaad-lands. Sorry, I promise never to do that again. After years of not seeing mountain sheep, we actually pulled up to them right next to the road. This dude was like, "yeah, these are my girls and you should just keep moving!"
"Badlands" is plural for a reason. The
Badlands National Park contains many areas each with a different look in the shapes and colors of the formations. The trip through the park consisted of a couple of hours slow driving on very curvy roads. There were lots of pull-outs each with a new grand vista.
As it says in the AAA Tour Guide, "Beneath the Badlands lies one of the world's finest Oligocene fossil beds of mammals which flourished 27-34 million years ago." When we were in the visitor's center we did see some weird looking fake animals from way back when. There was this ancient camel, with no hump, and which was only about three feet tall. I'm guessing he was mostly lunch for the big guys.
For me the park is less about the Oligocene critters and more about the enormous scale of time. The big picture takeaway for me is how our couple hundred years of history is represented by about a quarter of an inch of strata in the 69 million years of history I was looking at in the rock formations. Really folks, our being here at all is just a very temporary burp in the history of the planet. Hope that thought helps put your problems in perspective.
. . . time frozen in rock.
I guess time frozen in rock means if you want to see the Badlands there is really no rush. We learned the formations are eroding at the miserly rate of an inch a year. That's about four and a half feet since Gwen first saw it. Still awesome and will be for some time to come. Here is
a cool panorama you can manipulate to get another view of the place.
I know I promised Custer State Park information also, but that will have to be the next post. Thinking in terms of millions of years, and our likely brief history on the planet, I don't see why we need to be in any rush.
Onward, but with all this time, let's just ease on down the road!
Earl and Gwen
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