United States
Badlands
Striped buttes rising from the prairie like the spine of a buried dinosaur.
The sun cracks over the Badlands and the buttes ignite, bands of pink, ash grey and burnt orange stacked like sediment in a jar. The air smells of sage and dust, and the prairie silence is deep enough to hear the wind working the rock.
Badlands National Park protects 244,000 acres of eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires rising abruptly from South Dakota's mixed-grass prairie, where bison, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets still live. The crumbling walls hold some of the richest fossil beds on Earth; ancient horses and rhinoceroses roamed here, and their bones keep weathering out of the rock. The Lakota named this country mako sica, land bad, for terrain that punished travellers, and the park's Stronghold Unit lies within the Pine Ridge Reservation, where Lakota culture remains deeply present. Summer storms are violent and sudden, and after dark the sky is one of the least light-polluted in North America.
Solo
Walk a trail at dawn when the rock still holds its overnight shadows and geological time becomes something you feel rather than read about.
Couple
Watch the buttes cycle through colours from a Loop Road overlook at sunset, then stay for a night sky that needs no telescope to astonish.
Family
Children spot fossils on ranger walks, count prairie dogs by the hundred from the car window and earn a Junior Ranger badge before the ice-cream stop at Wall.
- The stratified buttes expose fossil beds among the richest on Earth, and bones of ancient horses and rhinoceroses still weather out of the walls.
- Bison, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets live on the 244,000 acres of mixed-grass prairie between the formations.
- The Lakota named this country mako sica, land bad, and the park's Stronghold Unit lies within the Pine Ridge Reservation.
- Prairie-dog towns along the Loop Road put hundreds of animals in view without leaving the car.
A hot glazed doughnut at Wall Drug, the Depression-era pharmacy that built an empire on free ice water.
An Indian taco, chilli and cheese piled on golden fry bread, from the Lakota tables of the surrounding country.
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