Badlands

I remember back in 1965 or so, a trip back east with my aunt and uncle. I must have flown out and they were passing through and offered a ride back from Wyoming. Unfortunately, they were returning from a disastrous honeymoon of climbing difficult rocks, something my uncle loved to do and my aunt discovered she did not like to do. I was confined to the back seat with books and pretty much kept my head down in the face of a stormy silence. I didn’t know at the time what went wrong, just that something was wrong. In their haste to end the trip, they passed by a number of things that I would have dearly loved to see: Mt Rushmore, Wall Drug and the Badlands. I’m pleased to report that as of right now, I have just seen all of them. But first the Badlands.

The Badlands are where the silty muddy bottom of the great ancient central ocean meets the beginning of the great upheaval and volcanic excitement that is known as the Rocky Mountains. We are still a good many miles from the Rockies, but the great piles and mounds of silt in colored layers stick up in impossible pinnacles. Every surface is runneled with water marks, and bubbles as though a pile of potter’s clay had been placed under a waterfall which was just shut off. Or some huge posse of enormous children spend a month making drizzled sand castles. There are towering pointy walls of soft stone, and canyons, in some places the silt is rounded hummocks, not pointy, and tinged with bright yellow and purple. The layers of vari-colored sediment all line up across the miles of peaks which gives a sort of optical nervousness to the view. There is a great grassy park on the upper level of the escarpment, and then on the other side it turns wild and bad and rough again for miles and miles. There were homesteaders who worked the upper grass lands, the visitor center has old photos of them dragging their wagons over the passes between the rocks.

It is a very beautiful but very alien landscape, there are few places on earth that look like this, lacking any plants, not because it is arid or toxic, but because every time it rains, it all loses another 1/16 of an inch of surface. Very hard to get a sense of the scale, what looks like a really tall peak suddenly has a person standing on it and we can see how little it really is. A grey day, but later on patches of sunlight that lit up one range, and left others dark. We did some short hikes to be on the ground, very rough going. One trail follows a watercourse, now dry, but showing the remains of yesterday’s hard rain, and then winds up the gully until there is a sort of rope ladder/stair of cables and logs we have to go up, the only way to give us a foot hold on this peculiar and unstable surface. We approach a notch in the wall of peaks and look through into another whole vista of peaks and canyons, all with matching horizontal lines of red or brown, and the sun does a great light show of highlighting one thing and then another.

We pass on through and head for Wall SD for lunch. Wall was a small town back in 1936, a RR stop, when Mr. Halsted, a pharmacist, arrived to open a drug store just about the time that people started to get in their cars and be tourists. He offered free ice water and put up the now famous signs to lure in passersby. His friend, Mr. Nicholson, went into the army in WWII and put up signs saying Wall Drug with the mileage to it all over the war zone. This was adopted by countless service men and the general public who placed the signs everywhere. 500,000 miles to Wall Drug. I remember a tiny town and a glass fronted store that I saw from the road as we drove by. Now the town is major tourist stop, the drugstore goes on for blocks, gift shops, restaurants, petting zoos, casinos, you name it they got it. Not my cup of tea, but there isn’t much else out here for tourists to do.

So now I have seen both of them.

Next day, we drive the last leg to Rapid City. After the Badlands peter out, the hills roll and swell, each one we go up takes us higher and the other side doesn’t really go down that much. In the distance, the Black Hills, a sort of overture to the Rockies. They are “black” because they are covered with pines, but really more like a dark navy blue which makes them look further away than they are. They are not quite high enough to be a big presence, the increasingly high grassy hills hide them from view most of the time.

Rapid City is a lot bigger than I expected. It is the only civilization for a long way and is a central shopping place for 200-300 miles all around it. There is a lot of industry, lots of homes, the RR of course and a lot of jewelry companies working with the gold in them thar hills. The gold was the reason for the town’s beginning: gold was discovered up in the Black Hills in 1875 and a group of disheartened prospectors founded the town in 1876, probably realizing that selling services to the gold diggers was a better bet than trying to find gold. Along with the beginnings of auto-tourism, in 1927, Gutzon Borglum began his work on Mt. Rushmore, arguably the most successful tourist attraction in the world, and Rapid City became the gateway to Mt. Rushmore and the rest of the Black Hills area which soon had caverns, zoos and casinos to entertain the tourists.

The campground is a good distance out of town, set among the velvet grassy hills. It is an enourmous campground, with some 460 sites, 65 cabins, a giant pool, hot tubs, restaurants, a full service gas station and on and on. They have left a lot of room between the sites and planted trees, and aligned and staggered the sites so that one doesn’t feel like a book on a shelf. Our site looks out on the hills and on the arena and stables of a university riding program, so I hear and smell and see horses all the time. We are settling in, the people we work with seem very nice, we even get our own golf cart to drive from fixit to fixit. It was a relaxed trip west, the right pace, lots of back roads, and now for the next adventure.