The Wandering Bulgar: Badlands and De Smet, SD

Seventy-five million years ago the entire Great Plains was beneath a shallow sea and in today's Badlands the bottom of that ancient sea appears as dark sedimentary rock called Pierre (pronounced "peer") shale, which is a rich source of fossils. The reddish bands in the rocky buttes that make up the Badlands are fossilized soils.

The ride from Rapid City to the Badlands was devoid of places to eat breakfast, so I waited until I arrived at the park and ate at a lodge there. One place on the road promised to be open, but it wasn't.


The "open" sign lies

There were quite a few people in the park, enjoying the stark scenery. The road winds up and down rocky hills and offers views of canyons and jagged buttes. The road had been chip-sealed recently, so there was gravel about and extra caution was necessary.

View from the lodge at the park entrance

Victor poses in front of a rocky outcropping

Why they call them Badlands

The road outside the park ends at Wall, SD, home of Wall Drug, where I didn't stop, having been there and done that. One exit east on I-90 and I was on US 14, riding through rolling hills and rocky, empty land that gradually turned into gentler hills, flatter land, hay fields, and then farms and a few small towns. I crossed the Missouri River in Pierre and continued on 14 the rest of the day until I stopped in De Smet, SD, famous as the setting for at least one book by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and where the author lived for several years.

Carol (who read all the Little House on the Prairie books) and I stopped in De Smet 1977 when we rode my R75/5 from San Francisco to Maine for our wedding. During the summer there's a Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant, which I attended this evening. It was held in an open field outside town, and the production was definitely amateur, but fun nevertheless. This year's pageant is based on Those Happy Golden Years, which is about teenage Laura as a schoolteacher, and her courtship and marriage to Almanzo Wilder.