Bad Bad Badlands

After being denied in Minnesota, we opted to drive through the night to the Badlands. The driving was windy, snowy, and deer-filled.

We hiked down into a canyon and plopped our stuff up on a bluff. In our explorations, we discovered bison poop, bison bones,...and a few bison. They're very big, and easily confused with trees at night.

Speaking of scale, we were both baffled by the scale of this landscape. Some things that look small are big and many things that look big are small. The landforms are so widely scalable that we found ourselves pointing to them all the time and saying things like, "Wow. I have no idea how big that is."

There was also singing.

At night we cooked up some of the sake we bought in Chicago and drank it right out of the pot. This kept us warm for further explorations. Our return from these explorations brought us over the ridge of some enormous mountains that were probably only 30' tall. We woke up covered in frost.

Our second day was ambitious. The whole landscape, with its horizontal stripes, is so obviously sedimentary, that from a good vantage point you could see how buttes far, far away were on the same level or plane. So we climbed up to the highest plane we could find and looked across to where the car was parked a few miles away on the same plane, a dot on the horizon. We didn't look at the car much, though, because there was plenty of other stuff to see. Bison, weird land shapes, enormous/small mountains... We lay in the big gold grass there for a few hours churning out Wall Drug postcards, sunning, napping and reading. The decent was an adventure as the land, with its mind-bending scale and flimsy materials, is much like a movie set. Muddy excuses for rocks tumbled down the cliffs with us as we scraped and scrambled our way down a narrow slot to the land below.

After packing up, our hike out was in the dark and our navigation dialogue included debates over what was a bison and what was a tree. We played it safe and never found out.