Bascombe's Travelblogue: July 2017: Epic Road Trip I: Part III--Day 5+: Badlands National Park and Deadwood/Lead, South Dakota

First view of the barren hellscape that is Badlands National Park

Day 5: Badlands National Park
I kid. Badlands National Park is actually really cool, not a barren hellscape. Pretty cool for an amateur, part-time, self taught geologist like me.

South Dakota of today is a mainly flat northern plains kind of state. We drove across South Dakota back in 1988 on our way to graduate school in Minnesota. The Black Hills were awesome, beautiful even. On that drive through the state, we passed through part of Badlands National Park, but we didn't stop. Then we found out what the rest of the state was like. Miles and miles of cropland and long straight highways dotted with billboards every few hundred yards advertising a place called Wall Drug. Turns out Wall Drug is a town that is a store. Kind of like when Peter Quill found out his dad was a planet. Who knew? Every now and then you'll still see a bumper sticker on a camper that says "Where the Heck is Wall Drug?" If you want to know more about Wall Drug, click on that link which will take you to some guy's, whom I've never met, travel blog. Then at the other end of the state is Sioux Falls, South Dakota and a town called Mitchell that decorates a building with corn every year. They call it The Corn Palace.

So, the industry in South Dakota seems to be mining and mountain carving in the west, agriculture and tourism in the rest of the state. At least that is what it seems to be if you only travel on I-90. I could say the same thing about Wyoming and Eastern Montana. If your only experience in those states came from driving across I-90 you might think they were boring states. You would be wrong. There is a great deal of history in all three states. There is a great deal of beautiful scenery in those states as well. And it's okay if most people think that there is nothing to see in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and South Dakota. Keeps people with strange ideas from wanting to settle there. Keeps the riff raff out. We like it that way. (Did I really say that?)

South Dakota is one of those places, geologically that just couldn't make up it's mind. For a great deal of it's prehistory, South Dakota was covered by an inland sea. Then it would dry up for a time and be a desert. Then it would be a giant freshwater lake and sometimes a saltwater sea called the Western Interior Seaway. Sometimes it was a moist coastal plain. There are all kinds of aquatic fossils all over South Dakota and especially the Badlands. Ammonites, brachiopods, and corals are some of the earlier fossils that are found there. Then larger animals and bony fishes. Sharks used to swim there. Remember In Jurassic World, the big dinosaur fish that ate the genetically modified raptor rex? It was called a mososaur. Guess what, South Dakota had those too.

Bird fossils and the largest turtle fossil ever found came from South Dakota. Who knew this place could be so cool? Then the land became land again and Triceratops and T-Rex hung out here as well. Dozens of other dinosaur species made South Dakota their home, although I don't think they called it that. While this place was covered with the sea, plesiosaurs swam here. The last of the South Dakota plesiosaurs was on holiday in Scotland and lost it's visa while visiting Loch Ness. Ok, so I made that part up.

During the Cenozoic period, the Black Hills began to be uplifted and that pushed the sea east. Hard to imagine that parts of South Dakota had beach front property. During that time, when the seas began were receding, about 30 million years ago, horses, camels, saber toothed cats (smilodon), rhinoceri, tapirs and many other mammals roamed in South Dakota. All of this is preserved in the fossil record. Remember when I said South Dakota couldn't decide what it wanted to be? During the Ice Ages the state was covered by water once again, but this time in the form of glaciers. Animal life during that time tended to be the megafauna that you would see in other parts of the Americas at that time, such as the wooly mammoth and so on and so forth. South Dakota, and especially the Badlands are a fossil rich part of the world. Conditions through most of it's history were right for the preservation of fossils.

The Badlands are a part of the state that were created through vast sedimentation over millions of years of being underwater, and being coastal regions, swamps, beaches and etc... Currently, South Dakota has decided to be Steppe land. The multi-colored sedimentation that created the rock layers in the badlands is now being carved and exposed by water and wind erosion.

The Lakota people found parts of the Badlands to be quite good for hunting and some lived there year round. Mostly, though they came to hunt and left. They may have coined the term badlands when they called it "mako sika". Homesteaders next tried their luck in the badlands and they couldn't make a go of it. During WWII, part of what is now called Badlands National Park was taken over by the Army Air Corps and was used as a proving ground. This area was used as a gunnery range and an artillery range until about 1968 when it was turned over to the National Park Service. Part of Badlands National Park is off limits to the general public because the ground is still littered with unexploded ordnance from wars past.

Enough of the history. This is our trip through Badlands National Park. We were there in July, therefore it was extremely hot. Being South Dakota, there isn't much humidity either, so it was scorching. We drove in through the back way and almost immediately we came across a herd of bison. Now, in Yellowstone, I usually won't stop for a bison or even a herd of bison. But here, in South Dakota, it was totally unexpected and I stopped and photographed a bunch of bison. All the cars that were behind me and impatient for me to continue on had South Dakota license plates. Apparently bison held no mystery for them. When we are in Yellowstone, The Hot Chick will get after me for being impatient with people from Connecticut or West Virginia or Mississippi stopping for photo ops for bison. I tell her that bison and elk lose their mystery once you have eaten them.

About ten miles away from the park entrance

This land looks bad, are we there yet?

Not yet

Self portrait of The Hot Chick

Holy crap! There's a bison!

More bison!

I was really excited by the bison. It felt weird

Check it out, more bison!

Enough with the bison!

We went in from the back way because we saw on the map that near the back entrance of the park was a prairie dog town. There was no park gate going in from the back way. Just a dirt road. There were very few cars on that road, so I don't think many people go that way. Because of our experiences at the prairie dog town at Devil's Tower, we wanted to see that again. The boys did not disappoint!

Idea of the colorful sediments abundant here

Camouflaged

Hidey hole

Mooned by a prairie dog!

Amazed at the abundance and variety of life in this barren hellscape

Cousins

From the prairie dog town, a glimpse of what the rest of the park was going to be like

That last picture was a tease. This area is really cool for an amateur geologist

The sentry

Love these guys

Enough with the prairie dog pictures!

and a meadowlark

For the next several miles, there were many turnouts to see the results of the water and wind erosion. The colors in the rock layers were really cool, and you could imagine what was going on during the different time periods when these sediments were being deposited. Almost like the redder deposits came when sediments were deposited from the west and the greener sediments were deposited when the rivers were flowing from the northeast and so on and so forth. The deposition and subsequent erosion looked like giant wounds in the landscape. The carving is so rugged and lacks vegetation so my amateur geology glasses make me think this erosion is relatively recent so far as the geologic timetable is concerned.

Arroyos

Almost looks like petrified dunes

Greenish rock formations

Life finds a way, always, but water comes first

Hard layers sandwich softer layers

Reddish rock

This stuff was everywhere

We really enjoyed these views

We kept looking at the rocks and then we began seeing more wildlife. Turns out that Bighorn Sheep are the bison of Badlands National Park. They are all over the place. I walked out to the edge of a cliff and on the rock just a few feet below me were a bighorn ewe and her lamb. The ewe and the lamb both had tracking collars on them and the ewe looked at me like, "The last time we saw one like you he gave us jewelry!"

Bighorn Lamb

Wildlife

Every time you think you've seen it all...

So rugged

Moonscape

Looks like a citadel

Full of amazing landscapes

The ewe and the lamb with jewlry

"Uh no sir, I don't want any more jewelry!" Said the ewe

unsure how to proceed

Mom shows the way

Tentatively, baby follows

Looking sad and pathetic. The lost sheep. Don't worry, though, mom found the baby

Almost looks like salt sculptures

Really incredible

Cave. Was going to run if a bunny came out of it

The colorful layers are stunning

Don't know what this is

Me and the fam

Me and The Hot Chick

Weirdness

More salt

And life finds a way

Here's a color we hadn't seen before

'Bout this time we stopped for a picnic. We drove through the rest of the park. There were some hiking trails, but we only did a couple of short ones because of the extreme heat and I don't think we had enough water to hike a long way. There were some interpretive trails with bronze replicas of fossils that had been found in the park. At the end, we stopped at a visitors center which showed the history and prehistory of Badlands National Park.

Time for a picnic

The colors were amazing

Stripes, indicating shifting layers of deposition. Alternating layers of sediments. The layers were created through erosion and deposition and are slowly being destroyed by the same forces that created them

Just incredible

Boys and rocks

More stuff to look at

I'm probably showing too many pictures

It just won't stop!

Then there was this ram overseeing everything, making sure we weren't tearing up the place

Florida fans were here

Another bronzed fossil

Then there was this guy

Deer

Spots

So, I think this is a Tapir

Actual living tapirs, not statues in a visitors center. Believe me?

Parting shot of Badlands National Park

Beginning of Day 6: Deadwood/Lead, South Dakota
After we broke camp, we headed out for our next destination, which was the Little Bighorn National Battlefield. On our way there, we stopped in Deadwood, South Dakota and her sister city, Lead. Lead is pronounced as if you were leading someone, rather than being pronounced like the heavy metal. Deadwood is almost as famous an old western town as Tombstone, and for the same reason. On August 2nd, 1876 Wild Bill Hickok was playing poker in Nuttal & Mann's Saloon when a man who had lost heavily to Hickok the day before walked up behind him and shot him point blank in the back of the head, killing him instantly. That man was later hanged for the crime. Hickok was holding two pair, black aces and black eights. This hand is now known as 'the dead man's hand.' Hickok has been inducted in the Poker Hall of Fame. Didn't even know there was one of those. Hickok was buried in Deadwood, and his body was moved a few years later. Because of the heavy mineralization of the soil in Deadwood, contemporary accounts said that when his body was disinterred, that it had absorbed so much of the surrounding minerals as to cause petrifaction. They claimed it was difficult to move his body because it now weighed 500 lbs. Something you don't see every day.

Deadwood was a gold town. The dark side of Deadwood is that it was originally part of the Lakota reservation, granted to the tribe forever. When gold was discovered there, the government could not keep the miners out, and didn't really try. Much, or most, or all of the Black Hills were taken from the tribe to allow the exploitation of the minerals found there. It is not a perfect world that we live in.

We stopped at a mine museum whilst in Deadwood, then we headed for The Little Bighorn Battlefield.