Badlands - South Dakota

About 75 million years ago a shallow sea spread across the Great Plains when the Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now.  This sea covered an area from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and stretched across the land from western Iowa on the east through Wyoming on the west.  As the Rocky Mountains rose under the moving Continental plates, the sea retreated and drained away leaving a sediment layer rich in fossilized animals from the sea.  Now the emerging land experienced a humid and warm climate with abundant rain and developed a dense subtropical forest.  Millions of years later as the climate dried and cooled the forest became savannahs and then the grasslands that they are today.  The ancient soils have collected one of the greatest arrays of fossil mammals on Earth, most of which are now extinct animals.  Some were small and deer-like.  Others resembled sheep.  There were three toed horses and early ancestors of modern pigs.  Saber-toothed cats the size of a leopard shared the land with small Subhyracodon rhinoceros and massive hippopotamus-like animals called Metamynodon.  Squirrel like rodents lived in the trees and ancestral rabbits nibbled on plants below them.

It has only been for 11,000 years that the land supported humans.  First were ancient mammoth hunters.  Much later nomadic tribes followed.  Their lives were built around hunting bison whose range extended from the eastern Rockies all the way to the western Appalachians.  Sioux and later Lakota came to these plains utilizing horses they had acquired from the Spaniards to dominate the land for 100 years from the mid-1700s.  Touching the land gently, they hunted and harvested only what they needed to support their way of life.  Eventually, European trappers, soldiers, miners, cattle farmers and homesteaders displaced the Lakota by introducing wheat fields to cover the prairies and practically eradicating the buffalo to replace them with cattle.

Preserved within the Badlands National Park are nearly 60 species of grass forming what remains of the native grasslands.  These grasses evolved to withstand high winds, long spells of dry weather and frequent fires.  Under the protected conditions in the park, black tailed prairie dogs, muledeer, pronghorn antelope, bison, coyotes and bighorn sheep once again thrive here.  Even one of the rarest of mammals-the black-footed ferret has found its way back to recovery here after being reintroduced in 1999.

This has been a marvelous stop in our travels to an area that is completely new to me.  The colors of the rock and the starkness formed a formidable barrier to the peoples who came here earning the name “Badlands” but I find them to be anything but that.