Badlands National Park

The Badlands Wall runs for some sixty miles across the prairie between the White River and the high plains to the north, a broken cliff of mudstone, ash and sandstone banded in pink, gray, buff and yellow. The Badlands Loop Road, SD-240, climbs over it between Interior and the town of Wall and is how most visitors meet the park, stopping at overlooks above the Pinnacles and at the soft ochre domes of the Yellow Mounds.

The visitor center at Cedar Pass is named for Ben Reifel, a Sicangu Lakota from the Rosebud who became the first Lakota elected to Congress. Beside it the fossil preparation lab works behind windows, and paleontologists will answer questions while they clean bones out of the rock. The beds are rich enough that visitors keep finding fossils weathering out along the trails, and the park asks that they be left in place and reported. The Door and Window trails are short walks into the wall; the Notch Trail climbs a log ladder up a gully to a ledge over the White River valley.

West of the Loop Road the Sage Creek country is a designated wilderness of mixed-grass prairie, with bison, prairie dog towns and pronghorn. The native bighorn was hunted out by the 1920s, Rocky Mountain bighorn were released in 1964, and in 1994 the black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, was released here among the prairie dogs it hunts. The rocks erode about an inch a year, and the landscape a visitor sees is still being taken apart.