More On The Badlands

We spent most of Sunday driving around the Badlands. But first, we went to church, at Our Lady of Victory in Kadoka, South Dakota (the town where we'd done laundry the day before). The church coincidentally has the same name as my parish in State College. It's a much smaller church, and not nearly as well-off as OLV back home. The place is kept going by local ranchers, their church lady wives and a few young families. The pastor, a man who looked in his late 30s and who came to the priesthood later in  life, gave a very good sermon, reflecting the Gospel reading, about the difficulty of handing your life over to Christ "with no back-up plan".

Our Lady of Victory in Kadoka, South Dakota

In the last post on Badlands, I didn't show much of the landscape. It's truly stunning, and in a way, out of place. In that western part of South Dakota, the dead flat prairie is starting to break into a more rolling (though still pretty flat) landscape. But the Badlands pretty much come out of nowhere. They are not close to any mountains, yet the terrain seems steep and mountain-like.

So what are the Badlands? They're kind of an escarpment. There is an 'upper' (to the north) and 'lower' (to the south) prairie in that part of South Dakota, with an elevation difference between them of a few hundred feet. Because of the nature of the rock in that area, there has been rapid (in geological time) erosion of the land that separates these two prairies. The intervening space is now full of cliffs, canyons, and channels. The change from the north end is rather dramatic. You're moving along, and then suddenly, there's a furrowed precipice. These furrows of erosion continue for a mile or sometimes several, down to the lower prairie. The name Badlands came from the difficulty of passing across the "wall" that separates the upper and lower prairie, and from the inhospitality of the land. There are 'badlands' in every continent except Antarctica, but the Badlands in South Dakota were the first to be called such.

Looking over the wall to the lower prairie

Looking at the "wall" from the south

As mentioned in the last post, we spent most of Sunday driving around the Badlands and saw them from above and below. We even took a couple of short hikes through the landscape. In the evening, we ate at a little dive bar in the town of Interior, just outside the park, and then called it a night. But not before we saw yet another of the stunning sunsets for which the park is known.

The Wagon Wheel in Interior, South Dakota

Badlands sunset

The mornings come very early in the Badlands, being at the very eastern edge of the Mountain Time Zone. The sun is up just after 5 and it is light well before that. Early birdsong can start before 4. Some common birds that were busy at our campsite were doves, magpies, swallows, and western meadowlarks. The swallows were constantly dive bombing and wheeling about in their endless forage for flying insects. (There's a species, the cliff swallow, that build their nests in holes they make in the wall of the Badlands.) And the meadowlarks were always calling to each other. After the morning symphony and breakfast, it seemed like we were on the road late, but it was not much past 7 when we left the park.  We headed out with the destination of the Black Hills, on the very western edge of South Dakota. Before leaving the Badlands environs, we went through the town of Wall (named for the 'wall' that is the Badlands) and stopped at Wall Drug. Wall Drug is a great bit of Americana. A kind of emporium that started out as a pharmacy and mercantile in the 1930s and just kept growing. It's now an interconnected group of shops, including a pharmacy, and a huge cafeteria. It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy, a stopover on a major east-west highway that willed itself, through hype, into one of the largest tourist traps in the world.  You start seeing billboards for Wall Drugs hundreds of miles away in either direction on I-90.

Wall Drug, in Wall, South Dakota

We'd planned just a short stop at Wall Drug, but, as it turns out, Wall Drug has one of the best western wear stores I've been in. Vicky had been looking, without luck, for a pair of cowboy boots to wear at the Calgary Stampede. She is hard to fit. It's either take what they have in the absolute smallest women's size, or look at the kids boots with the pink sparkles. But Wall had her size in several boots, and she finally got what she'd been looking for.

I picked up a nice wide-brimmed canvas hat with a mesh top. Great for keeping the relentless sun of Big Sky Country off my head and face. I almost bought a nice Stetson (no, not a 10-gallon), too, but it is more suitable for cold weather, and we only have so much room for souvenirs.

The Black Hills are only about 100 miles or so from the Badlands. We planned to take in a few sights, then bed down in Deadwood, a historic gold rush town in those hills. More on that tomorrow.