Badlands

Make sure you have a hotel or a campsite well in advance, you will be sleeping in your car otherwise..

I must have taken several thousand pictures…this place is absolutely gorgeous. I would have loved to stay there for months watching the sun rise and set there every morning and every night.

There was a freshwater lake in the midst
of the all surrounding red rock madness.
I swam to some stone formation of a 2 floor height.
Climbed it & had my ‘king of the word’ moment, – )~

We arrived at Sage Creek Campground after nightfall and we were greeted on the road by numerous pairs of bison eyes shining in the dark. It took over 20 minutes to inch the car through, very slowly and carefully. We had big plans to backpack into the wilderness at Sage Creek or somewhere in the South Unit, but it rained all the first full day we were there and our gear got all muddy. We didn’t have the time or energy to backpack out, but we spent the next day (which was nice) exploring past the fossil trail, and then around the door, window, and notch trailheads before we had to move on. Backpacking in the Badlands is still on my list of things to do before I’m dead.

Badlands is pretty and it is a nice drive. One will really get a grasp on the scope of our great land by driving across South Dakota and stopping off in the Badlands.