Last Updated: September 14, 2026
The Badlands are almost exactly halfway through their existence. Water began carving them out of the prairie around 500,000 years ago, and at the current rate of about an inch a year, the Park Service expects them to be gone in roughly another 500,000. Everything in the photographs below is temporary. That is not a melancholy thought so much as a useful one, because it explains why the place looks the way it does — nothing here is hard enough to last.
We came into Interior in the spring of 2022, west out of Mitchell and the Corn Palace, and it was the first stop of the year that felt like the West. Pronghorn in the grass, bighorn on the road, meadowlarks going all day, and a hundred miles of sky. We had last been here in 2018.
Visitor Information
Badlands National Park is open all year, twenty-four hours a day. The entrance fee is $30 per private vehicle, $25 per motorcycle or $15 per person on foot or bicycle, each good for seven days; a park annual pass is $55 and the America the Beautiful pass is accepted. The park does not take cash — cards only, at the entrance stations and the fee machines. The Ben Reifel Visitor Center at Cedar Pass is the main one and is open year round; the White River Visitor Center in the South Unit is seasonal. The Badlands Loop Road (Highway 240) is paved and runs about thirty-one miles between the Northeast Entrance near Cactus Flat and the Pinnacles Entrance near Wall. Interior, South Dakota sits at the park’s southeast corner on Highway 44, about three and a half hours west of Mitchell and an hour east of Rapid City. Current conditions and closures: nps.gov/badl.
Chamberlain and the Dignity of Earth and Sky
Halfway between Mitchell and Interior, Interstate 90 crosses the Missouri River at Chamberlain, and the welcome center on the bluff above the crossing has a fifty-foot woman standing on it in stainless steel. She is called Dignity of Earth and Sky, and she is worth pulling off for even if you have been driving since breakfast.
She was made by Dale Lamphere, South Dakota’s artist laureate, and dedicated in September 2016. Norm and Eunabel McKie of Rapid City gave her to the state to mark the 125th anniversary of statehood. Three Lakota women from Rapid City modeled for her, and the star quilt she holds out behind her was designed by David Claymore, who is Lakota; its hundred-odd blue diamonds are hinged so that they turn in the wind. The star quilt is the gift given at Lakota and Dakota naming ceremonies, funerals and honorings — the highest thing you can hand someone — so the sculpture is not a generic Indian statue on a highway. It is a specific object being offered.
She also stands over the same river we had been following for a week. Eighty miles downstream is Calumet Bluff at Yankton, where Lewis and Clark held council with the Yankton Dakota on August 30, 1804. The expedition passed under this bluff at Chamberlain about three weeks later. We did not plan the Missouri as a theme; it simply kept turning up.
Interior, South Dakota
Sixty-five people live in Interior. It began in 1883 as a way-station on the White River, opened by two Norwegian brothers, George and Louis Johnson, and for a while it was called Black. George Johnson renamed it Interior in 1893, apparently because the first name did not suit the country. When the Milwaukee Road came through in 1907 and 1908 the whole town picked up and moved two and a half miles northwest to meet the tracks, and the original site has been “old Interior” ever since. By 1912 it had an electric grid and a fresh water system.
The Milwaukee Road was one of the great overreaching railroads — it peaked in the 1920s having built all the way to Puget Sound, went bankrupt three times, and by 1980 had abandoned most of what it built. The tracks the town moved to are gone. The town stayed where the tracks were. That is most of what you need to know about small-town South Dakota, and it is why the population was 94 at the 2010 census and 65 at the 2020 one.
Badlands/White River KOA, Interior
Fifty-amp electric, full hook-ups and WiFi fast enough to stream, which after Yankton was a genuine relief. They had opened for the season a couple of days before we arrived, so the place was nearly empty, and there is a large fenced dog park that Jake made full use of. We finally had sunshine and no wind.
The tulips were just coming up. There is a small creek along the property with a beaver dam on it; the campground was arranging to have the beaver live-trapped and relocated, and we never did get a photograph of it. We saw a muskrat instead.
Badlands National Park
The name is a translation of a warning. The Lakota called this country mako sica, bad land, and the French trappers who came through later arrived at the same verdict independently: les mauvaises terres à traverser, the bad lands to travel across. Neither phrase is an aesthetic judgment. Both are logistics. There is no reliable water, the clay turns to grease when it rains, and a route that looks open from a distance ends in a fifty-foot drop. It is a beautiful place that is bad at being crossed.
Congress authorized a Badlands National Monument on March 4, 1929 — Calvin Coolidge signed it on his last day in office — but authorizing a park and owning one are different things, and it took another ten years to acquire the land. Franklin Roosevelt did not sign the proclamation that actually created the monument until January 1939. It was redesignated a National Park on November 10, 1978. That ten-year gap is the same story as every other park in this stretch of the blog: the boundary gets drawn first and the land is bought afterward.
The Geology: A Landscape Halfway Gone
The layer cake is real, and each layer is a different world. At the bottom is the Pierre Shale, black seabed mud laid down between about 75 and 69 million years ago when this was the floor of the Western Interior Seaway — an ocean that split North America in two, and the reason people keep finding mosasaurs in South Dakota. Above that is a band of yellow, the Yellow Mounds paleosol: not a rock but a fossil soil, the seabed weathered into dirt after the sea drained away, stained by goethite.
Then the Chadron Formation, pale gray claystone from a hot subtropical floodplain, 37 to 34 million years ago. Then the Brule Formation, 34 to 30 million, a mix of siltstone, mudstone and channel sandstone laid down as the climate turned cooler and drier and the forest opened into something like savanna — this is the rock most of the spires are made of. And on top, the Sharps Formation, 30 to 28 million years ago, largely volcanic ash blown east from eruptions in the Great Basin, including a distinct white band called the Rockyford Ash.
Which is the correction worth making to our own earlier description: the Badlands are not really a sandstone landscape. They are claystone, siltstone, mudstone and ash, with sandstone only in places. That is precisely why they erode at an inch a year rather than an inch a century. Sandstone holds. Compacted mud and volcanic ash do not.
The White River and the Cheyenne did the first cutting, and wind and rain do the rest, taking about an inch a year off every exposed surface. Run that forward and the whole formation is gone in another 500,000 years; run it backward and it did not exist 500,000 years ago. The fossils keep appearing for the same reason the buttes keep disappearing. It is the same process.
Saddle Pass
Saddle Pass is the short, steep one — a quarter mile that climbs about three hundred feet straight up the Badlands Wall from the Loop Road to the Castle Trail on the prairie above. It is the fastest way to understand the geology, because you go up through the layers with your hands on them. Do not attempt it wet. The clay that makes this place erode so fast makes it completely unclimbable after rain.
Bighorn Sheep
There were bighorn everywhere, and the rams kept a few miles between themselves and the ewes, which is normal outside the autumn rut. What is not obvious from the photographs is that none of these animals is descended from the sheep that were originally here.
A pregnant ewe off by herself, which is what they do shortly before lambing.
The native bighorn of this country were gone by the 1920s, shot out and killed off by diseases carried by domestic sheep. They are usually called Audubon’s bighorn, and the last of them is conventionally dated to 1926, though both the date and whether they were ever a genuinely distinct subspecies are argued over — some later work treats them as a regional variation of the Rocky Mountain bighorn rather than a separate animal. Either way, the Badlands had no sheep at all for about forty years.
Every bighorn in these photographs descends from twenty-two Rocky Mountain bighorn trucked in from Pike’s Peak, Colorado, in 1964, with a second group brought from Wheeler Peak, New Mexico, in 2004. There are about 250 in the park now, out of roughly 80,000 in the whole country. It was easy to park and watch them graze, and they are thoroughly used to vehicles — which is exactly the problem, because far too often we watched people get out and walk toward them with a phone. A ram will run you over. Stay in the car, or stay well back.
Prairie Dogs, and the Animal That Came Back Because of Them
Jake’s favorites. These are black-tailed prairie dogs, and we photographed them both at Roberts Prairie Dog Town on Sage Creek Rim Road and elsewhere along the Loop. We were watching for burrowing owls, which nest in abandoned prairie dog burrows and which we photographed here in 2018, but it was early spring and they may not have come back yet.
The prairie dog is the reason one of the rarest mammals in North America still exists. The black-footed ferret eats almost nothing else — prairie dogs are about ninety percent of its diet, and a single ferret gets through something like a hundred a year — and it lives in their burrows. When the towns were poisoned and plowed, the ferret went with them. It was listed as endangered in 1967, the last known wild population in South Dakota was gone by 1974, and when the last captive animal died in 1980 the species was considered extinct.
It was found again in 1981 because a ranch dog in Wyoming named Shep killed one and brought it home. That led to a surviving colony of 130 animals, and every black-footed ferret alive today descends from a handful of them. Between 1996 and 1999, 147 ferrets were released into the Conata Basin here, immediately south of the Loop Road. It became the most successful reintroduction site anywhere until sylvatic plague swept through the prairie dog towns in 2008. There are roughly 120 ferrets in the Badlands now, and it is one of the only self-sustaining populations in the world — meaning it breeds without animals being added from captivity. They are nocturnal and you will almost certainly not see one. You are looking at their groceries.
Bison, Pronghorn and Mule Deer
Bison came back in 1963, when the park brought fifty in from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. There are about 1,200 now, ranging mostly through the Badlands Wilderness on the west side, which is what Sage Creek Rim Road runs along — though they wander, and we came across them scattered well beyond it, including up near the Pinnacles entrance toward Wall. The park rounds them up each autumn for health checks and to move surplus animals out; a good share of those go to tribes through the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which is how bison have been getting back onto reservation land across the plains.
There was always a pronghorn in the background. They are not antelope and they are not deer — they are the only surviving member of their entire family, and they can hold roughly 55 miles an hour over open ground, faster than anything alive on this continent needs them to be. The usual explanation is that they are still running from the American cheetah, which has been extinct for about twelve thousand years. They also shed the outer sheath of their horns every year, which no other horned animal does. What they cannot do is jump, so a barbed-wire fence they could clear easily will turn them for miles.
Mule deer at dusk, and a lot of them. The ears are the giveaway, and so is the gait — a mule deer stots, bouncing off all four feet at once, where a white-tailed deer runs.
Birds of the Prairie
Western meadowlarks, and the song is the reason six different states have made this their official bird — Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming. South Dakota is the conspicuous gap in that list: the state bird here is the ring-necked pheasant, which is not native to North America at all. The meadowlark’s song carries a long way across open grass, and we spent a good deal of the week listening to it. The western and eastern meadowlarks look nearly identical and were only recognized as separate species because of the song; Audubon gave the western one the epithet neglecta, neglected, because everybody had been walking past it for years assuming it was the eastern bird.
Much harder to find, and harder still to photograph, was this sharp-tailed grouse. In April and early May the males gather before dawn on traditional dancing grounds called leks, stamp their feet fast enough to sound like a drum roll, inflate purple neck sacs and spin in circles, and return to the same patch of ground year after year. We were a little late in the season and this one was on his own in the grass.
The Stronghold District
The park has a second half that most visitors never see. The Stronghold District — the South Unit — is 133,300 acres on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and it is managed jointly by the National Park Service and the Oglala Sioux Tribe. We drove down into it, stopped at the White River Visitor Center, and went up the Sheep Mountain Table road, which leaves Highway 27 south of Scenic and runs about five miles of dirt to an overlook, with another two and a half beyond it that need high clearance and four-wheel drive. It should not be driven wet.
The Stronghold Table, out at the end of a narrow neck of land, is where the last Ghost Dance of the nineteenth century was held in 1890, in the weeks before Wounded Knee. It is still a place where young Lakota men go to fast and pray. It is not a viewpoint and it is not signposted as an attraction, and that is deliberate.
The more recent history is the harder one. In 1942 the Army Air Force took 341,726 acres of the Pine Ridge Reservation for an aerial gunnery range and moved 125 families off their farms and ranches. The range was used hard through 1945, the South Dakota National Guard shelled parts of it afterward, and most of it was declared surplus in 1968. Unexploded ordnance is still being cleared — by the Park Service, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, the Air Force and the Corps of Engineers, working together, eighty years on. In 1976 the 133,300 acres came into what was then Badlands National Monument, and there has been a long-running proposal to make the South Unit the first tribal national park in the United States.
This is the same pattern as the Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Land Between the Lakes and the Ozarks — a park assembled out of land that people were moved off. The difference here is how recent it is, that it was taken for gunnery rather than for scenery, and that the people it was taken from are the ones now co-managing it. None of that makes the place less worth visiting. It just means somebody paid for it.
What Is Underneath: The Big Pig Dig
The White River Badlands hold the richest late Eocene and Oligocene mammal beds in the world, and effectively everything paleontologists know about mammals between about 37 and 28 million years ago starts here. This was the ground where North American vertebrate paleontology got started in the 1840s, and the fossils are not deep — they surface at an inch a year, like everything else.
Which is exactly how the Big Pig Dig was found. In June 1993 a photographer named Jim Carney, out near the Conata Picnic Ground with a friend, spotted bone in the dirt just off the edge of the road. The first thing identified was taken for Archaeotherium, a big pig-like animal, so the site got called the Pig Dig. It then turned out that the bone belonged to Subhyracodon, a hornless rhinoceros. The name stuck anyway. More than 5,000 bones have come out of it — rhinos, the pig-like Archaeotherium after all, three-toed horses about the size of a collie, and Leptomeryx, a deer-like animal a foot high. The site appears to have been a spring-fed waterhole where animals got stuck in the mud in a drought, one after another, and died where they stood.
So the Badlands are named after a piece of bad navigation, the Pig Dig is named after an animal that was not there, and the town we stayed in was named Black by mistake. This is a hard country to label correctly.
Wall, South Dakota
Interior is at the south end of the park and Wall is at the north, on Interstate 90, and it is impossible to drive across South Dakota without stopping at Wall Drug. The billboards see to that.
Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the store in December 1931, in the worst year of the Depression, using a $3,000 inheritance from Ted’s father. It did not work. Five years in, they were close to giving up. Then in July 1936 Dorothy, lying awake listening to cars go by on the highway, worked out that everybody in them was hot, and that what they wanted was not a drugstore but a drink of water. She had Ted put up Burma-Shave-style signs offering free ice water. People started turning off before the signs were finished going up. The next summer they hired eight people.
It has been free ever since, and so has the sign campaign — servicemen put Wall Drug signs up all over the world during the war, and the store now takes more than two million visitors a year and twenty thousand on a good summer day. The coffee is still five cents, and the doughnuts are genuinely good. Everything else — the jackalope, the Zoltar machine, the saloon-girl statue on the bench that you sit down next to for a photograph — is exactly what you hope it will be.
Practical Tips
Drive the Loop Road in early morning or late afternoon. Midday sun flattens the rock to a uniform white; the layers only separate into color when the light is low. Most of our formation photographs were taken in the last hour of the day.
Sage Creek Rim Road is the wildlife drive. It is gravel, leaves the Loop Road near the Pinnacles Entrance, and takes you past Roberts Prairie Dog Town and into the Badlands Wilderness where the bison are. It is fine for a normal vehicle in dry weather and miserable in wet.
Do not approach the animals. The bighorn and the bison here are habituated, which is not the same as tame. Park, stay in or beside the vehicle, and use a long lens. If an animal changes what it is doing because of you, you are too close.
Bring cash for nothing, and a card for everything. The park does not accept cash at all any more.
Water and shade do not exist. There is potable water at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center and Cedar Pass, and essentially nowhere else. Carry more than you think you need, and remember that the White River is not drinkable — the white is suspended clay.
Where to camp. Cedar Pass Campground is inside the park with electric sites and a dump station. Sage Creek Campground is free, primitive, first-come first-served, and has no water and no hookups; bison walk through it. For a rig that needs full hook-ups, Interior is the answer, and the Badlands/White River KOA is where we stayed.
If it rains, stop hiking. Badlands clay becomes frictionless. Saddle Pass in particular goes from steep to impossible.
The South Unit takes a separate half-day. Highway 44 to Highway 27, the White River Visitor Center for orientation, and Sheep Mountain Table if the road is dry and your vehicle is up to it. Much of the surrounding land is privately held reservation land — stay on the roads and ask permission before crossing anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do you need at Badlands National Park? The Loop Road can be driven in two hours and that is what most people do on their way to the Black Hills. Two or three days lets you take the road twice in good light, walk Saddle Pass and the Notch and Door trails, drive Sage Creek for the bison, and get down into the South Unit.
Where is the best wildlife viewing? Bighorn sheep along the Loop Road, especially between the Pinnacles Entrance and Conata Basin Overlook. Bison and prairie dogs on Sage Creek Rim Road. Pronghorn essentially anywhere there is open grass. Deer at dusk.
Can you see black-footed ferrets? Realistically, no. They are nocturnal, there are only about 120 of them, and they live down prairie dog burrows in the Conata Basin. The park occasionally runs spotlighting programs; ask at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center.
Is Badlands National Park good for RVs? The Loop Road is paved and fine for a towed trailer, though the switchbacks below the Pinnacles are tight. Sage Creek Rim Road is not suitable for large rigs. Full hook-ups are in Interior and Wall rather than in the park.
What is the best time of year? Spring — May into early June, which is when we went — green grass, wildflowers, lambs and calves, and temperatures you can hike in. July and August regularly run over 100°F with afternoon thunderstorms. September is excellent. Winter is empty, cold and beautiful, and the Loop Road stays open.
Are the Badlands the same as the North Dakota Badlands? No. Same word, different rock and a different landscape; Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota is the other one, and we went there later on this same trip.
Next Stop
From Interior we carried on west into the Black Hills and Custer, South Dakota — granite, ponderosa pine, and a great deal more of the history that starts in this post.
