6/8/22 Badlands, S Dakota

6/8/2022

48 degrees this morning but promise of a sunnier day.   We gas up, get coffee and head south, into Badlands National Park.  We will drive the Badlands Loop and see what we can see!

  

It doesn't take long before we enter the fantastical rock formations of the Badlands.  At the first pullout,  this mountain sheep poses for us.  We can see his family up on a rocky ridge.

The park has 244,000 acres which contains mixed grass prairie interspersed with wild geological formations.  Home to bison, big horn sheep, ferrets and prairie dogs. Lots of fossils - they say ancient horses and rhinos roamed here. It was called bad lands by the Lakota Indians because of the difficulty of living there - extreme weather summer and winter, little water, poor soil and hard to travel through.

The sun is obviously behind us as we take in this view! But look at that lovely blue sky!

The rocks here are mostly soft and geologists say they erode at about an inch a year!  Granite, found west of here, erodes at an inch in 100,000 years!  So the badlands change relatively quickly!

These beautiful deer are making their way to higher grassland.

The grasses are very green right now, so that the tops of hills and mesas look like putting greens of a giant golf course.

In one area there are hundreds if not thousands of prairie dogs! But we don't stop this time.

We do stop near Badlands Campground which is a flat land surrounded by more jagged rocks. There is a small store/restaurant which we check out.  The nearby Visitor's Center will open in a few minutes but Greg doesn't want to wait.  So..... we head south towards Nebraska. (Home is beginning to call....)

 The first hour or so is more ranch land and cattle. Rolling hills and green grass.

Then things flatten out more and we are back to farmland.  Lots of corn, which is about 8 inches tall here.

A whole lot of flat makes the sky look huge - Montana's Big Sky Country has nothing on this!

It seems that Nebraska has many small town or county campgrounds.  We stop at this one - Hebron City Park which is part of a complex that includes a baseball field where there is a T-ball game in process.  There about 6 or 8 campsites and one is occupied by what looks like a long-timer.  There is a bathhouse with showers and flush toilets, though the showers look a little sketchy.  Once the tball game ends we have things pretty much to ourselves.  $15 with electric and a dump station seems a great deal!  

It's 77 degrees as we have dinner. Time to go back to shorts and a T!