July 13, More Badlands

Bad - yes, but not so bad they had to lock us up!

Jane and Bill arrived yesterday and we set out to explore the little town of Interior which is at the foot of the Badlands Park. There is a tiny jail, a schoolhouse, a grocery store and a filling station that also serves lunch everyday.

The Badlands, a name given to this area by the early Lakota Indians and French explorers, includes 240,000 acres of rolling grasslands, spires, buttes, peaks and valleys "of delicately banded colors that shift in the sunlight into thousands of tints that appear on no color chart". Today was an overcast, rainy day so the pictures are not a true indication of the magnificence of this area.

When we first entered the area, it looked like a giant sand castle rising from the flat prairie land. I was immediately intrigued. Bill took us on a 30 mile loop and although I shot probably 100 pictures, I knew a camera could not interpret the majesty of this place. It was mind boggling to see how rain, wind, erosion and deposition of materials, prehistoric fossils, and remains of ancient life could reveal themselves in such a mysterious, almost "unearthly" form. This formation took millions of years. Today we absorbed as much of that history as we could.