Urban Dictionary Bad

The Trip – Day 20

Rapid City, South Dakota – Murdo, South Dakota

Badlands National Park

155 miles 

When the first settlers saw the dry terrain of western South Dakota, they may or may not have appreciated the scenic beauty of its miles of sedimentary rocks, formed from sand, silt and clay and heavily eroded by eons of wind and water. Then, those who traveled through the area, and those brave enough to attempt to live there, would soon come to refer to that area as the “badlands”, “bad” in the classic Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of the word - “unfavorable, disagreeable, unpleasant”. Those coming to see the area today, now Badlands National Park, would be more likely to use the the Urban Dictionary definition of the word “bad” - “dope, good, tight”. (Translation for the unhip: “cool, neat”...)

Sun-clouds-shadow-wind God-art

We left Rapid City early on Day 20 to arrive at the Badlands early to beat the heat and the possible afternoon storms. (We beat the storms, but not the heat...) The park has almost 40 miles of road with scenic overlooks and short trails amid the rock formations and extensive prairie. There were dirt roads we opted out of, roads that would have led us to free-roaming bison and an extensive prairie dog town, but we drove 25 miles of the main paved road section, stopping at every overlook and hiking some of the shorter trails. Like so much of the rock formations in the west, the Badlands formations kept changing in color, size, and vantage point. The day was sunny, but there were big puffy cumulus clouds blowing across the sky, casting moving shadows on the landscape, making for some pretty impressive God-art. While the Grand Tetons was my favorite park on the trip, the Badlands would be my husband's favorite park. He described it as a smaller Grand Canyon, one you could easily walk into, sometimes from the bottom, looking up at the eroded rocks formations, sometimes from above, looking down into its small canyons, sometimes walking through or on the formations themselves. Despite the erosion potential of the sandstone structures, climbing them seemed to be

"Great to get out of that car!"

the thing to do, especially if one was between the ages of eight and eighteen. There were large sections of the park that had relatively safe climbing potential for kids, and climb they did. My husband said it appeared that travel-weary families, the parents, likely confined to cars for hundreds of miles with their kids, had found this perfect place to let their kids out to blow off all that pent-up energy in surroundings where they weren't likely to do too much damage to themselves. To those kids, and probably their road-tired parents, these lands were “bad” as in “great”...

The day did get hot, too hot for me to do all the hiking I would have liked to have done, though it didn't stop my husband and his camera. Fortunately, there was a great visitor center to cool off in. In addition to the usual geological displays and orientation films, this one had a paleontology lab, also known as the Fossil Preparation Lab, a place one could see some of the important fossils found in the Badlands and watch and talk to some very friendly working paleontologists. Visitors to the Badlands are highly encouraged to find fossils in the surrounding fossil-rich area, instructed to not touch their finds, but to get GPS readings on the location or, for the less technological, carefully articulated hand drawn maps, and report the find to a ranger or one of the paleontologists in the lab. Significant and rare fossils have been found by kids as young as seven (possibly blowing off steam climbing the formations after hours in the car...). While in the lab, I noticed a board with photos of kids and adults, paired with accompanying cards documenting the fossils they had found. There were about forty photos, and the ranger explaining the fossil-finding process said those were people who had found fossils at the Badlands in the past month alone! He told about a college student who had been so excited with her recent visit to the fossil lab and the information she received about the scientific discoveries made in that area that she said, “I'm going out today and find a fossil!” She did. How bad is that?

We didn't find any fossils ourselves, though we really didn't look very hard. We left the cool of the visitor center and did a little more hiking before parting company, my husband to check out a trail with warnings such as “Watch for drop-offs. Not recommended for anyone with a fear of heights. Treacherous during or after heavy rains”, me to the car to find some shade and pull the ice packs out of the cooler and put them down my shirt. The heat was bad, in the Merriam-Webster definition of the word, but the rest of the Badlands was dope and tight, definitely Urban Dictionary “bad”...

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt – John Muir

Next:

Winding Down

The Trip – Day 21

Murdo, South Dakota – Fairmont, Minnesota

Missouri River Sioux Falls

322 miles