Vivian's RV Vignettes

On Tuesday I made it to Badlands National Park in southwest South Dakota. This is actually my second visit to a “badlands” park, as I went in 2021 to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota with a similar kind of terrain. The badlands got their name because they are certainly inhospitable to travelers, with sharp peaks of bare rock and not much in the way of water or shelter. But for modern visitors in comfortable cars, they are starkly beautiful.

Since I only have a short time here and since there’s a nice loop road to drive to see the park’s best scenery, I opted to tour it by car rather than planning any big hikes. But I did get out at some of the overlooks to explore.

As my drive went on, the enormous prairie sky got dramatic with sheets of rain on the distant horizon.

The park is really a mix of rocky formations and open prairie. One thing that interested me, contrasting with eastern South Dakota, was how much more sparse the trees were. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books recorded that when her family took their homestead, there was not a single tree on it. But that’s definitely not the case now! They planted trees themselves, and so did many others across that whole region… in fact, some of the homestead claims were “tree claims” where the government required the occupants to plant trees. That program seems to have been wildly successful. But western South Dakota seems to be closer to its original state of treeless prairie, with grassland broken only by the occasional windbreak of trees.

The scenery on my drive was spectacular, but I didn’t see much wildlife on the paved loop. So on Wednesday morning, I decided to try the unpaved loop on the theory that there would be fewer humans and more animals. This proved correct on both counts.

There were a couple of bison just hanging out by the road and scratching themselves against fencing posts.

Don’t worry, I would NEVER get that close to a buffalo on foot! You’re crazy if you do. But I was inside my truck, and prepared to take off at speed if the bison showed any signs of annoyance. (They both ignored me completely.)

The prairie flora was pretty spectacular, too.

The road skirted the rim between upland prairie and badlands. It also ran through an enormous prairie dog town with thousands of burrows.

I pulled off at an overlook and just sat for a while listening to the prairie dogs talk to one another. That’s not an anthropomorphism. Researchers have found that prairie dogs have a legitimate language of their own which allows them to call one another by name and describe predators by color, size, and species. They were probably telling one another, “Hey, watch out for the idiot in the blue truck!”

There were some more bison far out in the field, and pronghorn antelopes, but sadly they were too far out to get good pictures.

I had to drive the rest of the road very carefully because prairie dogs kept running across it… one was chasing another who almost ran right under my wheels. But I made it back safely to my campsite (on private land in Quinn, South Dakota). A local duck came up to inquire politely if I had any snacks.

I’m sure I could spend a lot more time here in the Badlands, but tomorrow I’m scheduled to go on to far southwest South Dakota and Wind Cave National Park. I had a disappointment today when I went to book tour tickets for Wind Cave and discovered that the cave is closed to the public this summer while they install a new elevator. But the National Park itself is still open (you can drive on the surface roads to spot wildlife), so I’ll at least go do that and check the park off my list, even if I have to come back later to see the cave itself. Fortunately, I already know from a previous trip that the Black Hills are gorgeous. I saw them before in autumn, so I’m looking forward to seeing them now in summer.