The park lies only about 60 miles southeast of Rapid City, South Dakota, home to the closest airport, but about 375 miles north of Denver and 500 west of Minneapolis, the two cities with the closest large airports. The beauty - and the challenge - of BNP is its remote location. Whether because of time of day, or eons past, change is a motif central to the Badlands, still eroding under nature's forces by about an inch a year.
Overnight, countless stars pierce the dark night sky. Bighorn sheep, prairie dogs and pronghorn are just a few of the endemic prairie species that star in the uniquely American safari that visitors can self-guide on foot or by car.Īt sunset and sunrise, the vivid hues of mineral deposits in the rocks radiate warmth. To Native Americans, the area was a seasonal hunting ground for buffalo, animals that again inhabit the park, a deceivingly still preserve that teems with life provided you slow down to see it. Paleontologists - often seen working in an active lab at the park's main visitors center - continue to sift through the striated rocks for ancient seashells, ancestors to the modern horse and 50-foot-long marine mammals known as mosasaurs. Sod-covered buttes represent the Ice Age-era prairie, where ancient hunters left behind bison bones and arrowheads up to 12,000 years old. Rock layers that stacked up over about 75 million years began eroding a half-million years ago, sculpted into channels and canyons by the Cheyenne and White rivers. They are both badlands - a geologic term for soft sedimentary rocks that erode easily - and Badlands, a title derived from the Native American Lakota name “mako sica” or “bad lands,” referring to the scarcity of water, difficulty of navigating peaks and valleys and weather extremes that bake the ground in summer and freeze it in winter.Īs badlands, the 244,000-acre national park preserves a naturally excavated landscape revealing Earth's history. En español | Striped in yellow, amber and purple, the painted walls and serrated peaks of Badlands National Park dip and rise amid the prairie grasslands, making for a stunning surprise in remote western South Dakota.