RVgapyearNational Parks Archives

Catching Up

15/10/09 at 1.39pm / by Jessie / 0 Comment

Greetings from the Eastern Sierras in California!

Seeing as how we’re woefully behind in our blogging, I think it’s time for another Glee-like update. Since we visited North Cascades National Park in Washington and misadventured our way south toward Mount Rainier National Park in mid-August, here’s a quick run-down of what we’ve been up to:

-My parents flew in from North Carolina and joined us for 10 wonderful days in which we were thoroughly impressed by their ability to hike some tough, long trails at high altitudes while we explored Mount Rainier National Park (one of our favorite parks this year), Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument, Olympic National Park and the greater peninsula area. It was a full, fun, great visit with nearly perfect weather (Mount Rainier was out for us all week!).

-Thanks to my parents, we learned a new game called Quirkle, which we’re enjoying mastering. It’s sort of like a less sophisticated version of Scrabble with colors and shapes (you know, like for 4 year-olds).

-We’ve been reading some great books, including The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (Bruce Barcott), All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr), and The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Daniel James Brown). It’s been especially fun to read books set in places we’ve recently visited (e.g., Mount Rainier and Seattle/the Olympic Peninsula in Boys in the Boat).

-We got chased off the Washington coast by hurricane-like winds and rain. Literally, we got evacuated from our campground and then from a picnic area where we were trying to wait out the storm in an open area away from super tall, old trees. It wasn’t our best travel day.

-We thoroughly enjoyed a few weeks in Oregon. We visited and explored the beautiful northern OR coast, Mount Hood (who refused to show herself after many, many attempts) and the historic Timberline Lodge, the Columbia River Gorge, Portland where I got to see an old college friend, the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum where we celebrated Jason’s birthday, the cool town of Bend and surrounding outdoor recreational areas where we did some tough mountain biking and enjoyed the beauty, and Crater Lake National Park. Oregon was good to us.

-We spent a weekend in the Lake Tahoe area where we had fun watching hot air balloons from our campsite, eating overpriced Mexican food, and cheering on athletes at Ironman and 70.3 Lake Tahoe.

-We popped into Nevada from rural eastern CA to get the truck and trailer serviced. When the trailer had to spend the night in the shop, we were grateful to be in casino country where it’s possible to find a nice hotel room for $40/night.

-My sister and brother-in-law flew out from North Carolina and joined us for a week in Yosemite National Park and a quick trip to San Francisco to visit dear cousins. It was fabulous to spend time together, as we’ve missed them like crazy, and to hike up a storm with them in such a special place.

-We took a quick drive down part of Hwy. 1 in California and thoroughly enjoyed the beauty despite cool, rainy weather.

-We cruised back through Yosemite on our way east and got snowed on up on the high mountain passes. Gorgeous!

-We visited Death Valley National Park where we experienced flash flooding, lots of rain (a year’s worth in about 24 hours), and virtually unheard of cool temperatures and humidity. Despite many road closures due to the floods, we made the most of our time there and enjoyed feeling very small in the expansive desert surrounded by big skies, high mountains and canyons. We also met up with dear family friends whose travel path crossed ours.

-And now, we’re back in the eastern Sierra region finishing up our explorations of unexpected treasures like the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, Devils Postpile National Monument, Manzanar National Historic Site, the Alabama Hills, and Mount Whitney (the highest mountain peak in the lower 48) before heading to Joshua Tree National Park.

Whew! There’s your whirlwind update. We really do hope to return to more regular posting (and to posts that aren’t written in bullet-point format). In the meantime, don’t forget that you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram for more regular updates and lots more photos (links on the right). We also regularly update our Travel Log (Oh, the Places We’ve Been – link under “Pages” on the right) so that you can follow along in relative real-time.

As always, thanks so much for reading, following, and supporting our adventures!

Dodging Wildfires Version 2.0: North Cascades National Park

15/08/19 at 9.01am / by Jason / 0 Comment

On day four (of seven) of our time in North Cascades National Park, we picked up* the two smelliest individuals we’ve ever met. These chaps were from Wales and were ten weeks into a twelve week backpacking adventure in the western US. I’m not sure they’d bathed since arriving. Jessie had a very polite and seemingly delightful conversation with them as I drove as fast as was prudent with my head out the window (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea). About 30 minutes later, we parted ways with our foul but enjoyable new acquaintances and were on our way to Mt. Baker National Forest and Recreation Area.

We’d decided to leave North Cascades National Park for the day for less smoky hiking conditions after winds shifted overnight and sent a lot of smoke our way. You see, there were three separate wildfires burning in the southern part of the park. Not that these fires made CNN headlines like the Glacier NP fire with all of its fancy video footage and road closures. North Cascades is the second least visited National Park in the lower 48, so it isn’t exactly newsworthy the way the more popular parks are.

Mt. Baker National Forest is located about 40 miles west of North Cascades. During the winter of ’98-’99 Mt. Baker received a world record 95 feet of snow. It boasts a peak just under 11,000 feet and seven massive glaciers. The glaciers were the big draw for us, so after winding up 15 or so miles of dirt road we arrived at the Mt. Baker National Recreation Area Trailhead. As we pulled into the small gravel parking lot, we saw two guys hiking into the wilderness with skis. I looked at Jessie and said, “I think we might be in over our heads”. But we decided to press on, determined to get in some hiking. Up we went through alpine forests and boulder fields, across streams and waterfalls until the Easton and Squak Glaciers appeared before us. As we arrived at the fork in the trail where we had to commit to a route for the day, we came upon a lovely French-Canadian gentlemen who recommended one of the two trails we were considering. So we skipped the more popular Park Butte trail with its smoke-limited panoramas in favor of Railroad Grade, which promised an up-close-and-personal view of Mt. Baker. It did not disappoint. This hike is easily in the top ten for the year.

While at North Cascades, we learned the park is really about three things: (1) amazing, rugged, dense, unforgiving wilderness, (2) glaciers, all 300+ of them, and (3) hydroelectricity. Yep, there are three dams in the park established and maintained by Seattle City Light. These obviously predate the creation of the park. The one and only paved road, Washington Highway 20, that winds through the park follows the valley floor through most of the park where the dams and river/lakes are found. There is no road that leads to stunning vistas of glaciers or panoramas of the mountain ranges. In fact, you can see only one glacier from Highway 20, if you know where to look, the weather is perfect, and you squint real hard. Think of it as the opposite of the famous Going to the Sun Road at Glacier NP. This is the beautiful and frustrating thing about North Cascades. It is absolutely stunning, but to see it you’ve got to hike. And the hiking here is hard. Many trails start below 1,000 feet and gain 500-1,000 feet per mile. These trails will make you think your heart will pound out of your chest on the way up and your knees will shatter on the way down. We prided ourselves on being in good hiking shape before arriving at North Cascades and we were thoroughly humbled by the hiking there. It’s also the first park we felt truly disadvantaged by not having overnight backpacking gear with us. To see the best of what the park has to offer, you need a minimum of 2-4 nights in the back country. We simply can’t do that with the equipment we have with us. Next time.

While in the park, we had the opportunity to camp in two separate campgrounds (one of them totally free and lakeside), complete one tough 10-mile hike, take in a lovely 7.5 mile hike to Cascade Pass, and enjoy several smaller hikes. We saw the strangest “park film” of the year (we’ve seen about 14 of them). We took an official tour of one of the small towns built to service the dams and took an unofficial tour of another one of these towns that is about 70% abandoned and looks like the set of the “Walking Dead”. At dusk it’s downright creepy. We also marveled at how few people were in the park. At times it felt like we had the entire park to ourselves. Having your own national park is a pretty special thing. We just wish that the smoke hadn’t driven us out earlier than expected.

*We’ve observed that hitchhikers are more common in and around the national parks than most places in the US. In fact, we had to hitch a ride ourselves while at Arches NP. While in Glacier NP, we picked up a man and his backpack. At least it appeared to be a backpack from afar. In reality it was his two year-old daughter in a child carrying contraption meant to work like a backpack. He and the rest of his family had missed the last bus back to their campground and weren’t prepared to hike seven miles back to camp with a gaggle of young children in tow, so here he was catching a ride with us back to camp to get the car and pick up the rest.

Fire and Ice: Glacier National Park

15/08/14 at 7.54pm / by Jessie / 0 Comment

Just a couple of days before we planned to arrive in Glacier National Park, we read the news (a fairly rare occurrence these days) that a wildfire had just started in the eastern side of the park near the town of St. Mary. Initially small, the wildfire grew exponentially over the next 36-ish hours as we continued to monitor the news updates from beautiful Lolo National Forest well south of the park. Fortunately, we loved Lolo and were happy to stay an extra day or two until the fire stabilized (we hoped).

In the meantime, we developed alternative plans. We figured that, at best, our initial plan of spending two-ish weeks in the Glacier area simply wouldn’t be realistic due to the fire resulting in the closure of a significant portion of the infamous and scenic Going-to-the-Sun Road (GTTSR), which bisects the park and connects the West Glacier area with the eastern side of the park where much of the best hiking and best glacier views are found in the Many Glacier and Two Medicine areas of the park. We decided to spend our “leftover” time in North Cascades National Park in Washington. We read in one of our guidebooks that North Cascades NP is home to approximately 300 glaciers (Glacier NP has about 25), so it seemed like a good and suitable alternative. (Coincidentally, a fire would start in North Cascades prior to our arrival and continue to grow, but more on that in a separate post.)

As predicted, the fire in Glacier slowed down after a few days. It became apparent that at least the western side of the park would be perfectly safe. We were situated to enter the park from the west anyway, so we decided to head into the area determined to do whatever we could and to make the most of it. Of course, though, we were disappointed, as Glacier was one of our top priorities from the beginning of this trip and a place where, as aforementioned, we’d planned to spend a significant (for us) amount of time.

Initially, we were worried about smoke, but it turned out to be a nonfactor everywhere we went in and around the park except for the St. Mary area itself, which we traveled through on our way to and from Many Glacier. Despite the smoke, we stopped for a meal at Park Café in St. Mary, recommended to us as a worthy spot for a belated anniversary celebration dinner. The food and service didn’t disappoint, and we essentially had the normally line-out-the-door popular place to ourselves, which made us sad for the business owner and staff who rely heavily on summer park visitors for business.

Our other worry was how we’d be impacted by the GTTSR closure. Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Let’s start with the good.

With a little creativity, we figured out how to access the hikes we wanted to do from the road even though the “best” trailheads weren’t always accessible. We drove up the open section of road twice and thoroughly enjoyed its scenic rewards both times (we took a second drive when the weather was nicer and the road was opened a little further to allow access to its highest point along the Continental Divide at Logan Pass). We don’t know what the road looks like east of Logan Pass, but I can’t imagine that it’s as beautiful as the area west of the pass.

Now, the bad news: Glacier is a big park with relatively few roads. Without the benefit of the GTTSR bisecting the park, the only way to travel between the western and eastern sides is to drive around the park’s southern boundary on roads outside the park itself. From West Glacier, that meant a roundtrip of 3-5 hours to Two Medicine or Many Glacier on the eastern side and of at least 8 hours to Waterton Lakes, the Canadian national park that borders Glacier, as there isn’t a good western route between the parks.

We’d initially planned to celebrate our anniversary with a daytrip to Waterton (we had no desire to deal with the logistics of taking the RV into Canada for a night), and we quickly scratched those plans. Though we really wanted to spend more time in Many Glacier and Two Medicine, we ended up making just one daytrip to each area. The trips were totally worth it in terms of great hiking and breathtakingly beautiful scenery, but we simply didn’t want to spend a bulk of our time in the park driving. All week, we debated moving to a campground on the eastern side of the park, but it was too far to reasonably drive the RV without having a guaranteed campsite (Two Medicine and Many Glacier are first-come, first-served and have very few sites large enough to accommodate us, and St. Mary was closed during most of our visit and then was booked solid with prior reservations. Additionally, the eastern side of the park is bordered by a Native American reservation, so there aren’t good nearby camping options outside the park.).

Although we had a great week in Glacier, we definitely left feeling like it was “undone”, as we wanted to spend more time in the eastern part of the park. We certainly have a longer than usual “next time” list, mostly full of hikes we’d like to do in Many Glacier.

So, what did we do and enjoy during our week in Glacier?

We spent our first few days in a national forest near the park where camping was slightly less expensive, which allowed us to restock on groceries, get a cheap haircut at a cosmetology school in a nearby town, and enjoy a “down-day” of laundry, cleaning, and rest during one of several cool, rainy days. We also visited Hammer Nutrition’s headquarters in nearby Whitefish, MT where we showed up unannounced and ended up getting a personal 40-minute tour of the facilities by the company’s president, who filled up a bag with all kinds of goodies as we walked through the warehouse. Hammer Nutrition makes our favorite sports nutrition (drink mixes, bars, gels, supplements, etc.) and cycling gear. They also make delicious fair-trade organic coffee, which isn’t cheap, but which was included in our “goody bag” nonetheless, along with a pour-over coffee brewer, a simple but genius invention that means no more instant coffee for me! It was a true highlight of our trip.

Like Grand Teton National Park, parts of Glacier feel like a resort. There are lakes with overpriced boat rides, gorgeous historic lodges and inns with restaurants, bars, and expansive back porches/decks, at least one reading room with a gas-log fireplace (I know because I enjoyed warming myself there on a chilly day), and guided tours in antique red cars called “jammers”.

In an extended belated celebration of our anniversary, we treated ourselves to a ranger-guided historic boat ride on Lake McDonald after enjoying a tasty microbrew with a lakeside picnic (nothing says class like PB&J and beer). While we thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon of “luxury” (for us), it’s hard to believe, and quite sad, that some 50% of visitors to Glacier National Park never take a hike in the park.

True to our MO, we went on some great hikes. Our favorites were Granite Park Chalet (we started at the Loop trailhead because Logan Pass was still closed at this point), Grinnell Glacier, and Scenic Point.

The 360-degree vista from Scenic Point was a true highlight of this trip for me. Situated on the eastern edge of the Rockies, the point provides a high-altitude view of expansive prairieland to the east (which would have been enough for me to fall in love with on its own), and in a quarter turn, a view of prairie-meeting-mountains, and in another quarter turn, breathtaking views of glaciated mountains and lakes. It was simply spectacular.

I also fell in love with Avalanche Gorge on the way to Avalanche Lake. The whole scene left me spellbound – something about the clarity and color of the water, the forest scenery, the slot-like canyon formation and shape of the gorge, and the moss- and lichen-covered rocks was simply captivating. This was the silver lining of the fire and subsequent road closure: it forced us to spend more time in the western part of the park where we went on some shorter hikes that we otherwise may have passed by, which led us to fantastic and unexpected places like Avalanche Gorge.

Finally, the real highlight of our week was spending time with my sister’s best friend and her boyfriend/partner, who happened to arrive in the park toward the end of our stay (completely unplanned on both our parts). In addition to enjoying hugs sent from home, we loved having travel buddies, which hasn’t happened since Zion NP in Utah. They joined us for a hike and for a magical evening drive up the GTTSR after the road was opened to Logan Pass; we took way too many pictures in the beautiful fading light, marveled at the spectacular beauty of it all, and stood awe-struck at the pass as a nearly full moon rose above the mountains.

The next night, we enjoyed classic camping fun: a big campfire with roasted hotdogs and marshmallows, good beer, and wonderful company with lots of laughter. It was the perfect ending to a not-so-perfect but still very good week.

18 Hours in Wind Cave National Park

15/08/03 at 3.49pm / by Jessie / 0 Comment

Wind Cave, located in southwest South Dakota, is touted as the world’s most complex cave and is in the top ten largest caves in the world. About 100 miles of the cave has been mapped, which is quite impressive, especially when you pause to imagine 100 miles of multi-level, complex, rugged, dark underground terrain that reaches depths of 500 feet below the earth’s surface. Still, the most mind-blowing statistic is that per scientists’ estimates, only about 10% of the cave system has even been explored.

Wind Cave’s name reflects the principle of “barometric breathing”. Basically, the cave “breaths” (i.e. sends air out and pulls air in through above-ground holes and natural entrances) according to air pressure differentials between the inside of the cave and the outside above-ground world. When the air pressure inside the cave is higher than the above-ground air pressure, air leaves the cave (the cave “breaths” out). When the air pressure outside the cave is higher than that inside the cave, air moves into the cave (the cave “inhales” or “breaths” in). Legend has it that a local man discovered the cave when he noticed a small area of grass moving as though swaying in the wind, which was a curious sight on an otherwise still day. He went to investigate, and when he peered down into the cave’s hole (or small natural entrance), the air moving out of the cave blew his hat straight off his head. He returned later with friends to show off his discovery, and this time, when he knelt down next to the hole, the cave sucked his hat right down into the abyss!

Wind Cave is also unique for its large concentration of boxwork, a super delicate erosive formation that actually formed before the cave itself and is now naturally preserved and protected by the cave environment. Boxwork is plentiful inside Wind Cave – it lines walls and ceilings in some parts of the cave – but extremely rare elsewhere. Wind Cave actually houses 95% of the world’s known boxwork.

Lastly, Wind Cave is considered a dry cave in that it has limited active water flow and is finished forming. However, some ground water does slowly seep to the bottom of the cave, some 500 feet underground, where it’s found in aquifers. On its way down, the water travels through such an extensive system of natural purification that it’s the second purest water in the world after that found at our polar ice caps!

The only way to see any part of the cave is to take a ranger-guided tour. Only one tour goes into the undeveloped “backcountry” of the cave, and it was booked out a little too long for us and was on the edge of our budget comfort-level. Thus, we signed up for The Fairgrounds tour, the next best option in terms of length (both time and mileage wise). We saw lots of boxwork and other neat cave formations and features, and we learned a good bit. Otherwise, our tour was average. And to put it bluntly, there were lots of highly obnoxious kids on our tour: a three year old who was simply not suited for a 1.5 hour structured, rule-rich activity (I don’t know many three year olds who are, so I don’t blame him, but I may blame his parents, especially considering that there were several much shorter tour options with plenty of availability and exactly the same price-point), a group of older boys who insisted on using flashlights even though they weren’t needed and accidently kept shining them in other peoples’ eyes, and another group of boys who engaged in a silent human flatulence contest (perhaps they were inspired by the cave’s barometric breathing?). Yes, Wind Cave “breaths”, but it doesn’t breath that well; there’s nothing like foul smells in an enclosed underground space. Clearly, all of this detracted from our experience – an expensive-for-us experience, no less – and made me really appreciate the ranger at Carlsbad Caverns who kicked a family off the tour when their child couldn’t behave. Overall, though, I enjoyed our underworld experience and would love to go back for the longer “wild” caving tour one day.

Wind Cave National Park is also home to an expansive and beautiful aboveground ecotone, an area where two ecosystems meet. Here, prairie/grasslands meet ponderosa pine forest.

Ecotones are places where diverse wildlife flourishes, and Wind Cave NP is no exception. Bison were reintroduced to the park years ago, and now big herds thrive there, as does a large population of prairie dogs. Due to severe storms and our short time in the park, we spent only about two hours exploring the aboveground park via a self-guided driving tour and a short hike. In those two hours, we saw countless prairie dogs, a pair of adult coyotes with two pups, a herd of bison with numerous calves, lots of birds, and one huge bison lumbering toward us as we drove down the road. We stopped and waited while he casually switched lanes and walked around us, coming easily within six feet of the truck. He filled up the entire driver’s side window by a wide margin as he walked past; meanwhile, I stared in amazement while Jason sat still as a statue.

Although we managed to experience quite a lot in less than 24 hours, including camping inside the park, Wind Cave NP would be a great place to spend a few days. There are two distinct worlds to explore with multiple options for cave tours and a whole collection of established aboveground hiking trails, in addition to free-range exploration of the prairieland. It’s a must-do if you enjoy caving or are in the area, as it’s a short drive from Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Badlands NP, and a whole host of other South Dakota attractions.

The Big Bad Lands of Badlands National Park

15/07/17 at 12.09pm / by Jessie / 0 Comment

“I’ve been about the world a lot, and pretty much over our own country, but I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands . . . What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere – a distant architecture, ethereal . . . , an endless supernatural world more spiritual than earth but created out of it.” –Frank Lloyd Wright

Geologically speaking, the term badlands refers to arid soft-rock terrain that has been heavily eroded by water and wind to create hills, mounds, and other various geological formations, which can be quite colorful. Though badlands can be found scattered throughout the west, the “Big Badlands” are in southwest South Dakota and northwest Nebraska. Early inhabitants and explorers of this area, including the Lakota Native Americans and early Europeans, referred to the region as “bad lands” because the lands were difficult to cross and the climate extreme – it can be unbearably hot and sometimes stormy in summer, while unbearably cold in winter, with year-round wind that can be relentless.

I started noticing badlands in southern Utah and was enthralled by them. So, I was pretty excited when Jason admitted that my idea to go to Badlands after Yellowstone wasn’t completely crazy. After some map studying, we slowly headed east through Wyoming with a few-day layover in Cody and a quick stop in the funky town of Thermopolis where we soaked in the world’s largest mineral hot springs and then quickly showered to rid ourselves of the smell of sulfa. We passed through some serious mountainous terrain, reaching an elevation so high that the temperature dipped to a chilly 43 degrees! I assumed that the Badlands region of South Dakota, situated at a much lower altitude, would be similar to southern Utah – arid, desert-like, mountainous, and full of brown, red, and white. I was completely unprepared for what we found as we motored our way into South Dakota: green! Wide open seemingly endless expanses of green.

It simply hadn’t occurred to me that South Dakota is part of the Great Plains, a landscape defined by grasslands/prairies. Maybe it’s growing up on The Wizard of Oz and Little House on the Prairie books, but I’ve long felt an inexplicable attraction to the Great Plains of the Midwest despite many people making comments along the lines of, “Oh, it’s pretty boring, just lots of flat fields that go on and on”. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s even more beautiful than I imagined. Maybe the element of surprise of unexpectedly being in the Great Plains added to my excitement and perception of beauty, and maybe I’ll have a different perspective at the end of the year if we drive back to North Carolina via Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, etc., but I doubt it. For me, the wide open grasslands hold a timeless simple beauty. The emptiness and vastness feel freeing and welcoming. And between the vastness and the constant breeze, the grasslands feel almost like an ocean; and, like being at the beach, I found a certain kind of peace there. The prairie grasses also smell absolutely amazing.

I will pause to note that, in hindsight, we technically saw a piece of the Great Plains in west Texas and probably saw some badlands formations there as well, but they were nowhere near as striking, and I truly didn’t absorb them or even recognize them as such until just now. The prairie of Badlands and the surrounding area, much of which is protected as a National Grasslands, is full of unadulterated, unspoiled beauty, rolling hills, and diversity. In fact, Badlands National Park and Buffalo Gap National Grassland protect one of the biggest remaining tracts of mixed-grass prairie in the country, and I absolutely loved seeing all the different types of grasses, plant/wildflower- and animal-life that thrives there. (Another fun fact: prairies are defined as areas that are too wet to be deserts but too dry to sustain tree life.)

Between my recently discovered fascination with badlands and my long-held desire to see prairieland, I was super excited to be in Badlands National Park. My excitement grew even more as we settled into our campground and began exploring. The park has two campgrounds – one developed and one primitive. We chose Sage Creek Primitive Campground, reached only via an unpaved road and nestled in rolling prairieland adjacent the Badlands Wilderness Area. It felt just right. The campground had ample space for us and several other RVs, though it was primarily inhabited by tent campers. Within an hour of setting up camp, I realized this campground embodies so much of what I think a national park campground should be: isolated, scenic, quiet, simple, and well, primitive and undeveloped. And, it was free!

On our first evening in the park, I mountain biked from our campground up the dirt road to a point with 360-degree panoramic views and simply breathed in the beauty of the grasslands and the badlands that slowly emerge from them, and then in the distance, sharply rise from them. I realized the park as a whole embodies so much of what I love about nature and so much of what I desire in a national park – it’s isolated, otherworldly, undeveloped, open, pure, vast, and often breathtaking.

Over the next few days, we explored the park to our heart’s content.

We drove the main park road, hiking the shorter trails and stopping at the many overlooks along the way.

The road follows “the wall”, which is essentially the uprising of cliffs and buttes where the badlands have formed, so the main road cruises through the heart of Badlands. Words really fail me in describing the beauty and otherworldliness of the badlands, so I’ll hope that pictures really are worth a thousand words.

We mountain biked Sheep Mountain Table Road, an unpaved road in the Stronghold (Southern) Unit of the park, which offered magnificent views of the valleys below and of badlands that look similar to the formations found at Bryce Canyon National Park. Biking this small section of the Stronghold Unit was a great way to get a taste of this ultra-remote section of the park.

We saw an abundance of wildlife – more bison, pronghorn antelope, and prairie dogs, which I spotted after recognizing the chirping sounds they make to communicate with each other. We learned at Bryce Canyon that prairie dogs are intelligent and have highly developed communication; they make different sounds to warn each other of different dangers, including predators.

We also heard lots of coyotes near our campground at night, howling and barking back and forth to each other. I saw my first rattlesnake and channeled my inner Cheryl Strayed (author of the book Wild) as I dismounted my bike and walked around him with a ridiculous amount of space between us. We also saw our first big horn sheep, which I’ve been so eager to spot!

We were lucky enough to see several groups sheep (lambs and all), and we spotted one herd running full speed across the prairie – a pretty awesome sight! We got a kick out of the way they agilely lounge and walk right on top of the narrow ledges, and we loved this one ram who seemed to enjoy being on display atop this butte not far from a well-traveled trail.

We also did a little backcountry hiking. As a ranger told me, Badlands is an “open park”, meaning you can go anywhere you please; there are no restrictions or limitations. People even climb on the badlands formations themselves, sometimes not realizing that going up is much easier than coming down (it was good entertainment to watch). As an open park, there are relatively few established trails, all of which are in the front-country and all of which are fairly short and easy. There are no truly established, maintained backcountry trails, though “cross-country hiking” is totally permitted, as is dispersed camping (provided you’re a certain distance from roads or trails) since there are also no official backcountry campsites. Basically, the message is, “Explore the wilderness totally unrestricted. Take lots of water (because there is limited water in the prairie and what is available is so full of silt that it can’t even be treated), a compass, and a topographical map. Enjoy and good luck!” It’s quite a different (and somewhat refreshing) attitude than we’ve experienced at other parks. There are backcountry registers in a few places, but basically, you could set out from any point in the park, walk out into the prairie and badlands, and forge your own path as you go.

That said, there are some semi-established backcountry routes that seemed to be largely ill-defined social trails. In our experience, there were no rock cairns or other markers to follow. Dirt paths existed for several hundred yards and then disappeared, at which point we looked for footprints, natural markers, and indentations in the grasslands. We also may have followed some backpackers for a short distance when we lost the “trail” less than a half mile from the backcountry register. We hiked through the prairie in grasses and wildflowers ranging from ankle to shoulder height (maybe “waded” is a better term than “hiked”). We climbed up buttes and into depressions where ponderosa pines grow. And we even discovered and explored a small slot canyon. We enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by badlands near the end of our “trail”. And we marveled at the brightly colored wildflowers and the diverse grasses that exist in so many hues of green and brown.

As if all this isn’t enough, Badlands exists to protect not only geology and prairie, but also a land that’s rich in fossils. Fossils exist throughout the park, found especially in a certain layer of rock. While we didn’t spot any fossils, lots of visitors do. In 2010, a seven year old girl completing a scavenger hunt as part of a Junior Ranger program discovered what turned out to be the skull of a saber-tooth cat! Her discovery led to a whole new area of the park being explored for fossils. Fossils are so frequently found that the park employs fossil preparators, and visitors can watch them prepare fossils in a lab within the Visitor Center.

So there you have it: Badlands is one awesome place and among my favorites visited. (More photos below.)

“peaks and valleys of delicately banded colors – colors that shift in the sunshine, . . . and a thousand tints that color charts do not show. In the early morning and evening, when shadows are cast upon the infinite peaks or on a bright moonlit night when the whole region seems a part of another world, the Badlands will be an experience not easily forgotten.” –Freeman Tilden