The Badlands - Day 4

Prairie Homestead

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We started out at the Prairie Homestead, which was near the NE entrance to the park. It’s a reconstruction of an actual sod house from the early 1900’s. It was pretty cool, though I think what Josh and I found most amazing was that the whole homesteading thing happened less than 100 years ago, and that people were actually living in sod houses not that long ago in the Midwest. It kind of gave us pause about how young our country really is and how much “progress” we’ve made in such a short amount of time. We waxed philosophical a bit about what progress really was, and the fall of Rome and other random topics I don’t think either of us expected to be discussing. Oh, and Dove chased white prairie dogs around for a bit. They’re so cute!

After paying an entrance fee to the park, you drive about a quarter mile and then you have to stop. To the left and right of you are the most magnificent structures of land ever. I’ll also back up the conversation by saying that we’ve never been out west to any of these parks, and we’ve never seen vista’s like this. We were pretty blown away…it looked like we’d entered another planet, or like a dinosaur should walk by us soon. Another strange feature about the Badlands is that the entire park is open to the public, which means that you can walk or hike anywhere, even out to the edge of some of these rock formations (and I suppose OVER if you were so inclined). It was really disorienting to walk down this tiny cliff path with gorges on either side that were all striped, but it was magnificent. We took lots of pictures, but honestly I don’t think anything can compare to what it actually looked like.

Chasing white prairie dogs

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We continued thru the park to one of the hiking trails – the map we had said it was an hour long strenuous hike, so we got geared up for it. We were back in 30 min, though not unhappy that we’d had so much water with us. This whole strenuous thing is a little overused I think. After that, we were a little tired so took a scenic drive thru the park and then detoured to Wall, SD, to see this pharmacy that was advertised everywhere. Amusingly our GPS navigator told us to turn down this sort of road thing and we ended up in the middle of grasslands laughing hysterically at the “shortcut.” We turned around in less than a mile, despite enjoying the adventure – it would have taken us days to get there.