Hiking in the Badlands

Hi Blog! On Tuesday, August 25, 2016, we decided to put our boots on the ground of the Bandlands National Park. The entire badlands are open to hiking. However, this being our first foray into this new territory, we decided to stick to the established trails. The Door Trail is only 3/4 a mile long and the first part is on a boardwalk which leads through a break in the Badlands Wall known as "the Door." Here Kathy stands in the "doorway."

As you walk through The Door, you get a view of an intricately eroded canyon. It wasn't hard to find the end of the trail.

The Badlands are full of really cool features like this toadstool formation. Toadstools are created when blocks of hard sandstone fall from the ridge above. 

The sandstone forms a cap that is very hard and resistant to erosion. The underlying layers of soft clay and silt erode away while the sandstone block remains in place. Eventually it will fall over and the whole process will start over again.

There is a really short trail called the Window Trail, which is basically just an overlook into the badlands. We didn't take any pictures since it was basically the same view we saw from The Door.

The next trail we trod was The Notch Trail. We began the hike following a drainage up into a draw. We soon came face to face with The Wall - a thick ridge over 100 miles long. The trail guide says to get up to the notch in The Wall, you have to climb a planked rope ladder. It was more like a wire cable and small rounded log ladder, but it did the trick. Here Kathy does her best not to look down while climbing up! Little did she know that was the easy part.

Here is the view back down the draw we just walked up.  You can see the rope and log ladder up the canyon wall in the left side of the photo:

Once up on top of the butte, a new canyon opened up.

We followed the upper canyon back until we reached the edge of The Wall. Peeking through The Notch, the White River Valley spreads out before us. We are looking down on the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, as well as parts of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

We spent some time poking around the various nooks and crannies of the upper canyon before descending the log ladder. Before leaving the lower canyon, we decided to follow it as far as we could. Here is Dave standing under a "waterfall." However, the only thing falling right now are crepuscular rays.

After a tasty trail lunch, we decided to tackle part of The Castle Trail. The entire Castle Trail is five miles one way. We had already hiked four miles before lunch, so decided we would only have time for a trip out to the halfway point, Saddle Pass, and then return to the parking area giving us an additional five miles of Badlands hiking. The trail description says the trail winds through the prairie and gets you up close and personal with a number of Badlands formation. Here is Kathy prancing through the prairie portion of the trail.

It is hard to believe that homesteaders actually tried to live in this arid land. Since parcels were given away by lottery, they didn't know what they were getting into.

The Badlands formations lose about an inch a year due to erosion by wind and rain. Here Kathy stands in a sea of eroded sand.

In addition to toadstools, we also got to see a number of really cool sod tables. Here, the grass roots form a tight webbing capping the top of the table. Eventually, the grass roots exposed on the side die and the table gets smaller and smaller. Dave climbed on top of this table to show scale.

We were about a mile from the turnaround when we encountered these bighorn rams romping in a nearby canyon. We watched for a while and took about 100 photos.  Here is the best one.

This photo will give you a good view of The Wall near Saddle Pass. Can you find the two rams in this photo?

We never did make it all the way to Saddle Pass. After spending time with the bighorns, we decided to return back to the trailhead, check into our motel room and get ourself a six pack to wash down the Badlands dust.