Special to Travel
If you’re looking for the best of the West, it’s almost impossible to pass up the rugged beauty of South Dakota.
The play of dawn light tints the rock faces a gentle bluish-pink that warms to red, gradually covering existing layers of purple shale, chestnut sand, orange iron oxide and white volcanic ash. Dark shadows lie sharp and flat off the wind-honed edges and ridge lines of the buttressed hills, like a watercolor painting defined with black felt marker.
These hundreds of square miles of ravines and knife-edged towers in southwest South Dakota make up Badlands National Park. They were formed starting about 37 million years ago, when floodwaters came down from the newly risen Rockies. During the next 15 million years, they carved ravines through what was once forest, slowly molding the unique terrain.
The Sioux called it “mako sica” or bad land. Even later, French-Canadian trappers called it “les mauvaises terres à traverser” – bad land to cross.
These lands were bad to cross primarily because of a roughly 90-mile range of fantastic spires and sawtooth ridges, a sculpted mudstone wall roughly 1,000 feet high at its highest that runs from Nebraska to South Dakota and is bounded on both sides by prairies.
I started my South Dakota experience with a sunrise hike in the Badlands’ Castle Trail. The park has six developed hiking trails, from 2/3-mile Door Trail, which promises the Badlands at their “baddest,” to five-mile Castle Trail.
The trail led off over grass-tufted ground toward a scattered range of pointed hills receiving their first dose of morning light. The play of light and shadows was truly stunning. I scrambled over rocks, through shoulder-high dry streambeds between the spires and into an expanse of broad prairie.
Grasslands, which make up 60 percent of Badlands National Park, and the more rugged mudstone terrain abound with life. Fortunately for visitors, bison, prairie dogs and white-tailed deer have replaced the sabre-toothed cats, rhinoceros-like titanotheres and large-tusked pigs of long ago.
On the prairie, meadowlarks sang and the smell of sweet clover mingled with wild sage. After crossing a wide open plain dotted with green, flat-topped buttes, a cliff edge suddenly appeared on my left and a moonscape of hundreds of eroded spires poked up from a broad dry valley hundreds of feet below.
The trail followed this brink, then eventually veered off to another edge, perhaps half a mile high, but less precipitous than the last one. Probably nowhere was it more difficult for wagon caravans to cross the Badlands than from where I stood at that moment. Huge eroded mounds hid the trail down the narrow gullics and abundant folds of the steep bluff.
When homesteaders heading into the interior found the passes too steep for wagons, they parked their rigs at the top, then walked the horses down. Edwin Denig, chief clerk of Fort Union, a 19th-century fort in the area, once had to blindfold his interpreter before the frightened man could be led down the cliffside. I had a hard enough time coaxing myself down, as I stepped and slid down dry gullies grappling uselessly at smooth mudstone.
From Badlands National Park headquarters, it’s about a two-hour drive to Custer State park, a completely different landscape. In keeping with the spirit of riding across the Serengeti plains, I took an open-air Safari Jeep Tour into the back country to get a late afternoon glimpse of the wildlife here. Wildlife abound coyotes, elk, deer, mountain goats, bighorn bison, sheep, wild turkeys, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope and burros.
Custer State Park is the second-largest state park in the United States with 73,000 acres of mountains, forests and prairies. Visitors may drive the 18-mile Wildlife Loop Road in their own vehicles or take an escorted jeep tour. In terms of animals, the park’s biggest claim to fame is its herd of roughly 1,400 bison, one of the largest in the world.
Older bulls join the main herd during the breeding season from July into September. Bison, often called buffalo (or tatanka in Lakota Sioux), are especially raucous then as males challenge one another for breeding rights.
We came upon a small grouping of a dozen or so hairy beasts where the dust never settled: One large male circled females and butted other males, emitting a few low roars. A smaller male hopped around butting heads with the larger male. Another buffalo wallowed in the dirt, trying to rid his thick, brown hair of bugs. Every fall, park personnel and professional horseback riders herd the bison to the Fred Matthews Buffalo Corrals in the southern end of the park to vaccinate, brand and sort the herd for auction in November. These events attract buyers and spectators from across the country.
The park has 11 hiking trails, including four one-to three-mile loops designed to point out park nature and history. Anglers may walk through wildflowers into the Grace Coolidge Fishing Area or between sheer canyon walls to the French Creek Natural Área for excellent trout fishing.
A few miles north of Custer, blasting goes on, as it has for decades, at Crazy Horse Memorial. What will be the biggest sculpture in the world continues to emerge from a 600-foot mountain in the Black Hills: a carving of Lakota leader Crazy Horse astride his rearing stallion.
The head of Crazy Horse-best known for leading Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho natives in the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 – is taller than the Sphinx and bigger than the four faces on another South Dakota landmark, Mount Rushmore.
The first dynamite blast at Crazy Horse Memorial came in 1948. Since then, 8.3 million tons of granite have been blasted off the mountain. Its creator, Korczak Ziolkowski, died in 1982 but his family continues the dream, and the face is finally becoming recognizable.
There is still a long way to go. The plan is to complete the face by 1998. Completing the remainder of the sculpture – Crazy Horse’s flowing hair, pointing arm and mount – depends on funding and weather. The nonprofit project is financed exclusively with admission fees and donations. Korczak was a staunch believer in the free enterprise system and turned down millions of government dollars for the project.
If you go:
For information about South Dakota’s summer events, contact South Dakota Tourism at (605) 773-3301.
Badlands: Cedar Pass Lodge has cabins in the heart of the Badlands next to the Visitor Center. Call (605) 433-5460. Campground next door is $8 per night. Call (605) 433-5361 for more information about the Badlands.
Custer State Park: The state owns four resorts in Custer State Park with housekeeping cabins $75 to $125. Call (800) 658-3530 for reservations. Camping is available near meadows, forests or streams at seven park campgrounds. For reservations at some, call (605) 255-4000 or ask South Dakota Tourism for a campground guide.