Buttes, Rattlesnakes and Canyons: They’re Called The Badlands for a Reason

 After I crossed the Missouri River, there were no more neat grids of fields, but a far less civilized arrangement of sagebrush and hills.

The land in western South Dakota pitches and rolls like a confused sea and seems just as endless. When I came through, cattle drifted about the emptiness like wayward vessels, their backs shimmering in the heat of the sun. Occasionally, a ledge of crumbling stone would jut out like a bone through a butte of dried-up grass. In other places, erosion had carved deep arroyos into the dusty ground. For all I could tell, they might have been cut by a downpour last week or they could have been marked in the land for a thousand years or more.

The word that comes to mind when I think of this landscape is “unfinished.” Some master-architect had gone off some half-written blueprints and never got around to putting in trees or water features. The guy had left broken rock lying around, maybe planning to make them into ornamental walls later on. When it came time for the paint job, he’d cheaped out and made everything beige.

Beige was the rage, the color for rocks, for dirt and all the grassland flora. The whole thing looked slap-dash and unstable, built from crumbling low-grade materials that could fall apart at any minute.

I had a difficult time accepting that for hundreds of miles, this unruly chaos was actually the law of the land. No one had come to level off the buttes or neaten up the shrubs. There was only the road, closed off on either side by barbed wire fencing.

Inside the Badlands National Park

Cresting a rise, I estimated that I could see about five miles of highway to the front of me and about the same distance in the rearview mirror. I was alone. But I had my Led Zeppelin going strong — the BBC sessions in case you were curious — and was loving every minute of the crazy journey. The road could go forever. After thousands of miles, I had finally discovered bliss behind the wheel.

I laughed, I honked at cattle, drove a hundred miles an hour. I could do whatever the hell I wanted.

For every car I saw, there were at least two billboards. The signs for Wall-Drug were spread out over maybe two hundred miles “An American Experience!” they shrieked to the passing cars. Then there was 1880 Town. “Come Ride With McNasty!” the signs exhorted, an attempt to lure little kids behind the gates.

To the south, I could see a place where the land dropped away. Miles distant, there was a tawny mesa jutting out above the plains.

I pulled off at a highway exit. It was $15 to get inside the park. My fee got me a map of the trails, brochures about local wildlife along with warnings not  to travel far without water.

It was indeed burning hot and dry. The land showed it. There was an overlook where you could look out over a cliff, over the prehistoric land. The cliff itself was made of something in between stone and crumbly mud. It dropped away, perhaps 300 feet, revealing alternating stripes of beige and rose colored sediment that lined up perfectly with the stripes on the opposing walls a half-mile away.

The land looked so water-starved that I imagined I could have pissed out a whole other canyon if I’d wanted to.

The soil was cracked up like alligator skin, parched out of its mind by the sun and wind. It was hard to tell where the rocks ended and the rock-hard soil began.

Powerlines at sundown

After staring at the godforsaken land for the appropriate amount of time, I got back on the road, following it in between the buttes. The landscape would have worked just fine in any of the Road Runner cartoons. I stayed vigilant for falling anvils and all suspicious packages labeled “ACME.”

The road descended the cliffs over a series of steep switchbacks to a park information center.

Beyond the parking lot there were countless tall buttes, shimmering in the bright sun. The headwall I had just driven down stretched for dozens of miles either way and rose 500 feet. Back in the day, pioneers had come to grief trying to drive their wagon trains over the forbidding escarpment. The cliff itself was cut up into a labyrinth of deep canyons, mind-bogglingly complex. Within a half-mile of careless walking, I thought, it would be a cinch to become hopelessly lost.

The author  exploring a canyon

Beyond the handful of tourists snapping pictures at the visitor’s center, the wide empty land impressed me, and I knew that I needed to explore.

To do this, I put on my running clothes and a small backpack that I loaded up with the maps, my camera and plenty of water. I brought a compass so I wouldn’t have to rely on the difficult-to-distinguish features of the landscape as guidance.

It was good to be running again, exciting even from the road. The map showed some trails nearby, but before I got to them, I saw some power lines that lead into a canyon.

“I wonder how many people have been down there.”

I ended up walking more than running, simply staring into the grandeur. Eventually, I lost the lines and wandered through the crisscrossing nexus of secondary canyons. I paid close attention every time I came to an intersection. After all, the steep, eroding walls made it almost impossible to climb out of the maze, and I forgot the turns, it might not be so easy to find my way back. A creek had run through the place during the wetter seasons, and there were still sections of puddles and sticky mud.

A frog, resting in the muck, was seemingly unperturbed by my sticking a camera in his face.

High above, birds nests made from mud clung to canyon walls. Several dozen of them were clumped together. With their gourd-like shape and the dark openings at the top, they made me think of featureless, terracotta dolls, jawas to the Star Wars fans amongst us.

There were a lot more of these suckers up high on the canyon walls.

Eventually, the canyon started to narrow and I decided to turn around and see what the marked trails had to offer.

The first thing I noticed at the beginning of the path was a sign that read “Beware of Rattlesnakes.”

The word “beware” has so much more poignancy than “caution” or even “danger.” When I think of caution, I think of wet floors in malls—“don’t fall on your dumb ass!” “Beware” is a word that should strike fear into your very soul. 

As I started up the steep embankment, the sun, low in the sky, cast a blush over the land. Among the buttes, there were those highlights and deep shadows that landscape photographers prize. As I climbed higher, I could look upon the endless Dakota grassland stretching east.

Near, the top I went off trail so that I could reach the top of a local butte.

I guided myself up a nimble pitch of rock, balancing on a ridge of scree that was treacherous as marbles on a tile floor.

Suddenly, there came a sharp rattle.

“Oh shit!”

I leaped back and nearly fell bass-ackwards the way I’d came.

Yup. It was a rattlesnake, maybe four feet long, coiled like a spring with its head bobbing ominously from side to side. The little forked tongue flicked the air, and the bead eyes locked into mine, communicating indifferent regard.

I had read that the snakes around here attacked rarely, but would give a warning. After that, it would behoove the interloper to step away and I was all too happy to do so. The snake kept watching me, but made no move.

Feeling a little braver than before, I reached for my camera and took a few shots. Disdaining paparazzi, he began to slither off.

I started back down to the trail, chastened by the encounter.

Yeah — you better run! 

The top of the pass leveled out into pancake-flat prairie land. I started running again, but slowly and with my eye out for assassins in the dust.

At the top of a small hill of dirt, I surprised an entire herd of mule deer. They burst into flight, bounding off in strange, lock-kneed leaps.

Suspicious mule deer

It was still light enough that I felt comfortable going back off trail, and ascended another butte. From the top, I saw dark clouds climb above the broken landscape. The sunken light lit them with a hellish glow from within.

I shivered in my t-shirt. Before, it had been baking hot. Summoning  what nimbleness I could muster, I negotiated the slippery scree on the way back down and ran the remaining two miles back to my car.

That night, I pulled into a campsite, but stayed inside the Mazda.  A honking wind out of hell ripped across the flatland, buffeting the sides of my metal and glass shelter. My makeshift tarp shelter would have been futile with no trees to tie up to, and because wooden barriers prevented me from moving my car to a place where I could park on the tarp. As in Wisconsin, the car sleeping really sucked. At least I slept for free. I woke up early enough to head out before the fee-collector came around.  

Canyonlands