Badlands Loop Road: Big Badlands Overlook to Pinnacles

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Badlands Loop Road

Welcome to Badlands National Park, and to the Badlands Loop Road. This tour follows the paved road west through the park's North Unit, with nine stops at overlooks, trailheads and the visitor center, and it ends at Pinnacles Overlook.

Let's start with the name. For hundreds of years, the Lakota people have called this place mako sica, which means, quite literally, bad lands. French fur trappers who passed through called it bad lands to travel across, and since they spent time with the Lakota, their name very likely came from the Lakota one.

It earned the name. When it rains, the clay turns slick and sticky. Canyons and buttes block the way. Winters are cold and windy, summers are hot and dry, and what little water there is tends to be muddy and unsafe to drink.

Today the park covers about two hundred forty-three thousand acres. It protects one of the world's richest fossil beds, the largest protected mixed-grass prairie in the United States, and places of deep spiritual and historical meaning to the Lakota people.

Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can take in this country at your own pace.

Point 1 · At the stop

Big Badlands Overlook

This is Big Badlands Overlook. In front of you is the eastern end of the Badlands Wall, a long line of eroded cliffs that runs from near the town of Kadoka, in the east, all the way to the town of Wall, in the west. On a clear day, look far to the southeast for Eagle Nest Butte, rising on the horizon.

Now look at the stripes in the rock. The reddish bands that fill most of the view belong to the Brule Formation, laid down more than thirty million years ago. Near the base of the slopes, the darker gray beds are older still. Geologists call them the Chadron Formation.

Here's the remarkable part. These formations are wearing away at about an inch a year. That's fast for rock. The granite of the Black Hills, to the west, erodes about an inch every ten thousand years. Rivers and rain have been carving these badlands for about half a million years, and the park's geologists expect the Badlands to be worn away completely within roughly another half million.

So the landscape you're looking at isn't finished, and it isn't permanent. It's in the middle of disappearing, and you've come at a good time to see it.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Door and Window Trails

Next, we're heading to the Door and Window trails, where you can walk right into the Badlands Wall. On the way, here's how that wall came to be.

The park explains it with two words: deposition and erosion. First, over millions of years, layers of rock built up, stacked like a layer cake. Then rivers started cutting them apart.

The bottom layer is the Pierre Shale. It was laid down about seventy-five million years ago on the floor of a shallow, warm sea, the Western Interior Seaway, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean and covered most of the Great Plains. It held shelled ammonites, and mosasaurs, giant marine reptiles that could grow longer than fifty feet. Dinosaurs were alive at the same time, but dinosaurs couldn't swim. So you won't find any in that sea floor, and none have been found in the Badlands at all.

When the sea drained away to the north, its muddy floor weathered into soil. Then came hot, wet floodplains, a little like the Everglades today. Then a cooler, drier, open savanna. Then rivers, and volcanic ash from eruptions in the Great Basin, where Utah and Nevada are now. Each world left its own layer, and the stacking stopped about twenty-eight million years ago.

About half a million years ago, the Cheyenne and White Rivers began cutting down through the whole stack. Every canyon, ridge and spire in this park comes from that cutting, and the cutting is still going on today.

Point 2 · At the stop

Door and Window Trails

These are the Door and Window trails, two of the shortest walks in the park, and two of the best.

The Door Trail starts as an accessible boardwalk that leads through a break in the Badlands Wall known as the Door, out to a wide view of the Badlands. Where the boardwalk ends, the maintained trail ends too, and a line of yellow posts marks a route across the bare rock. Past that point, you walk at your own risk.

The Window Trail is another short, accessible boardwalk. It ends at a natural window in the wall, looking into an intricately eroded canyon.

The third trail that starts here is the Notch, the park's most popular trail, and the one with the most injuries. It winds through a canyon, climbs a ladder, and follows a ledge to the Notch itself, with a dramatic view of the White River Valley. Plan on an hour and a half to two hours there and back. The park doesn't recommend it for anyone afraid of heights, and it can be treacherous during and after rain.

A few park rules for any walk here. Carry water. Keep at least a hundred feet from wildlife. And leave every fossil, plant and rock where you find it. Collecting them is illegal, and the next visitor deserves the same discovery you get.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Ben Reifel Visitor Center

Next, we're heading to the Ben Reifel Visitor Center at Cedar Pass, the center of the park. But before there was a park here, there was a dance hall.

In the nineteen-twenties, a former banker named Ben Millard came to the Badlands, homesteaded below Cedar Pass, and built what became Cedar Pass Lodge, the first business in what would later be the park. It started as a barn-like building that served as a dance hall, with cabins for visitors. On weekends, famous names played to a crowded floor, Lawrence Welk among them.

Millard did a great deal more than run a lodge. In 1931, he picked out what he believed was the most scenic route through the Badlands and staked it out on the ground. The state finished a thirty-mile road through here in 1935, which met one of the conditions Congress had set for creating a national monument. When the monument came, Millard offered the park service about twenty-eight acres at Cedar Pass for its headquarters, which is part of the reason the park is still run from this spot.

He died at the lodge in 1956. The next year, a stretch of the Badlands Wall just east of Cedar Pass, about six-tenths of a mile long, was named Millard Ridge in his memory.

Point 3 · At the stop

Ben Reifel Visitor Center

This is the park's main visitor center in the North Unit. It's named for a man whose life is part of this country's story.

Ben Reifel was Lakota, born in 1906 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. He worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, served in the Army and rose to lieutenant colonel, and from 1961 to 1971 he served five terms in Congress, the first Lakota ever elected there. Afterward, he worked as a special assistant for Indian programs to the director of the National Park Service. The visitor center was given his name as part of South Dakota's Year of Reconciliation.

Inside, the exhibits run from the mosasaurs that swam over this spot seventy-five million years ago to the Lakota who live south of the park today. There's also a park film, The Land of Stone and Light. In spring, summer and fall it runs on a loop; in winter, just ask at the desk and they'll play it for you.

In summer, don't miss the Fossil Preparation Lab. It opened to the public after a remarkable saber-toothed, cat-like skull was found in 2012, and it's unlike any other fossil lab in the park service: you walk right in, watch paleontologists free real fossils from the rock under microscopes, and ask them anything. In 2019 alone, more than seventy-one thousand people came through.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Fossil Exhibit Trail

Next, we're heading to the Fossil Exhibit Trail. On the way, the story of how the rest of the world found out what's buried here.

In the 1840s, a fur trader named Alexander Culbertson, of the American Fur Company, made a trip from Fort Pierre to Fort Laramie and gathered a collection of fossils and bones in the Badlands. In 1846, a St. Louis physician, Hiram Prout, used that collection to publish the first scientific description of a Badlands fossil: a piece of the lower jaw of a huge rhinoceros-like animal, the kind later called a titanothere, or brontothere. The next year, more fossils from the same area were described, and the rush was on. It was the start of the era of the great American fossil hunters, and these badlands have been studied for more than a hundred and fifty years since.

Why so much attention? The park sits on one of the world's richest beds of fossil mammals from the end of the Eocene and the start of the Oligocene, a little more than thirty million years ago, when this part of the world was turning cooler and drier. The animals that lived through that change are preserved here layer by layer. The park's own planning documents say the research done in these badlands has contributed greatly to the science of fossil vertebrates in North America.

And the most common fossil mammals in the Badlands? Not saber-toothed cats, and not rhinos. Plant-eaters called oreodonts. You'll meet them on the trail.

Point 4 · At the stop

Fossil Exhibit Trail

This is the Fossil Exhibit Trail, a fully accessible boardwalk loop, about a third of a mile around, with fossil replicas and exhibits of animals that lived here and are long extinct.

The trail has been here a long time. When it was finished in 1962, it showed real fossils, partly dug out and left in the ground under clear plastic domes. Today the boardwalk features replicas and exhibits.

Which animals? From the older, wetter times, ancient alligators and the massive brontotheres. From the cooler, drier savanna that came after, the grazing oreodonts, and the predators that hunted them, including cat-like animals with saber teeth. The park's paleontologists have also prepared fossil horses, rhinos, early dogs and big pig-like animals called entelodonts.

If you walk the loop, look at the ground beside the boardwalk as well. Visitors find fossils in this park every year. In 2019 alone, they reported more than three hundred seventy-five, and some turned out to be species never before known from the park. The rule is simple. Leave it exactly where it is, and tell a ranger.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Bigfoot Pass Overlook

Next, we're heading to Bigfoot Pass Overlook. The view there is beautiful. The name carries one of the hardest stories in American history.

On December 15, 1890, the Lakota leader Sitting Bull was killed. Afterward, about two hundred of his Hunkpapa people fled to join Chief Spotted Elk, who was also known as Big Foot, and his band of Miniconjou Lakota, near the Cheyenne River. On December 23, Spotted Elk's people set out for the Pine Ridge Reservation, to seek refuge with Chief Red Cloud. Their way led through what is now Big Foot Pass, and on to the White River, where they camped.

Five days after they set out, a detachment of the Seventh Cavalry met them and escorted them to Wounded Knee Creek. The next day, December 29, 1890, the soldiers moved to disarm them, tensions rose, and the soldiers massacred an estimated one hundred fifty to three hundred Lakota men, women and children.

The park protects places that matter deeply to the Lakota people, including the site of one of the last Ghost Dances, on Stronghold Table in the South Unit. The park describes that Ghost Dance as one of the events that led to Wounded Knee.

Point 5 · At the stop

Bigfoot Pass Overlook

This is Bigfoot Pass Overlook. The park calls it an impressive geologic vista, and it's also a historic place: it marks the route of Spotted Elk and his people on their way to Wounded Knee.

The land falls away below you toward the White River Valley. The nearby overlooks on this stretch of road all look down into the same valley. At one of them, the White River Valley Overlook, a group of tall formations is known as the Castle. Panorama Point, close by, is named for views that seem to go on forever.

There's a picnic shelter here, and it's a good place to sit for a few minutes before moving on.

The story didn't end in 1890. The park's South Unit lies within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and since 1976 the National Park Service has managed it together with the Tribe. The Lakota live south of the park today, and the park's White River Visitor Center, on the reservation, is the place to learn about the Badlands in Lakota heritage.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Prairie Wind Overlook

Next, we're heading to Prairie Wind Overlook, for the other half of this park: the grass, and the animals that live on it.

Bison once ranged across all of these plains. Then, for about a century, there were none in the Badlands. Cattle and sheep grazed here instead, and grazing went on even inside the national monument until 1962. When it stopped, the rains of 1962 and 1963 were generous, and the grass came back fast. The park's superintendent proposed bringing the bison home.

In November 1963, twenty-eight bison arrived, from Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park in North Dakota and Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska. They were released in Sage Creek Basin. The next fall, twenty-five more came. By the end of 1967, the herd numbered one hundred twenty-two, and the bison had made it clear they preferred the remote country of Sage Creek.

Pronghorn didn't wait to be invited. In the 1940s, they were seen here only on rare occasions. By the 1960s, a hundred or more were being reported in the monument every year, with no reintroduction at all. They came back on their own.

Today the park lists bison, bighorn sheep, swift fox, pronghorn, coyotes, prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets among the animals you can see here, living in their natural habitat.

Point 6 · At the stop

Prairie Wind Overlook

This is Prairie Wind Overlook, and for once, the view isn't about rock. It's about grass.

North American prairie comes in three main kinds, named for the grasses that dominate them: short-grass, mixed-grass and tall-grass. The short-grass prairie runs along the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, where the grass gets very little moisture. What you're looking at is mixed-grass prairie, and Badlands National Park protects the largest preserved mixed-grass prairie in the United States, the largest in the whole national park system.

That matters because so little is left. Native prairie survives on only about two percent of its original range. Even here, invasive plants push out the natives almost unchallenged, so the park fights back with prescribed fire and with herbicide.

The North Unit also protects the Badlands Wilderness, sixty-four thousand two hundred fifty acres of badlands and prairie set aside for exploration and solitude.

Two percent. Stand at the rail for a minute, and take a good look at what's left.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Homestead Overlook

Next, we're heading to Homestead Overlook, and the people who tried to farm this country.

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the first Homestead Act. A citizen could claim a hundred and sixty acres of public land in the West by filing an application, living on the land and improving it for at least five years, and then filing for a deed. The land was called free, but it came at a great cost to Native Americans. Much of what was handed out as homesteads had been taken from the peoples of the Great Plains, through laws like the Dawes Act. In February 1890, a presidential proclamation opened the country between the White and Cheyenne Rivers, including the land of today's North Unit.

At first, settlement was slow. In the 1890s, this was cattle and sheep country. Then, in 1907, two railroads were built across the region, and the homesteaders came. One longtime resident remembered that when his father arrived in the spring of 1906 there were few homestead buildings, and by that fall there was a shack on almost every quarter-section, because people knew the railroads were coming.

The trouble was that a hundred and sixty acres wasn't enough to make a living out here. Congress kept raising the limit: three hundred twenty acres by 1915, and in 1916, six hundred forty acres for grazing land. High prices during the First World War encouraged even more claims. By 1922, less than half of the land that later became the park was still public.

Point 7 · At the stop

Homestead Overlook

This is Homestead Overlook, where you can see both of this park's worlds at once: the badlands, and the prairie.

Picture a claim out there around 1910. Newly plowed sod. A house built of lumber hauled by rail from the Black Hills. Some homesteaders here lived first in dugouts, dug right into the ground.

They were up against the same things that gave the Badlands their name. Clay that turns to sticky mud in the rain. Cold, windy winters and hot, dry summers. And water that was scarce and usually muddy.

The people who came before them read this land differently. The evidence of early human life in the Badlands points to seasonal hunting, not permanent settlement. For thousands of years, people came here, hunted, and moved on. The homesteaders tried to stay, and many of them couldn't.

Take a last look at that line where the grass meets the bare rock. Somebody once tried to make a living right up against it.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Yellow Mounds Overlook

Next, we're heading to Yellow Mounds Overlook, close to one of the park's most famous fossil digs. It began with two tourists doing exactly the right thing.

In June 1993, two visitors from Iowa noticed a large backbone sticking out of the ground near the Conata Picnic Area. They didn't dig it out, and they didn't take it home. They left it where it was and told the staff at the visitor center. The park expected a four-day excavation. It turned into fifteen years of digging, with the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and by its seventh season, more than five thousand bones.

That first bone was thought to come from an ancient pig-like animal, so the site was nicknamed the Big Pig Dig. It turned out to be a kind of rhinoceros. The name stuck anyway.

Why so many animals in one place? Scientists think it was a spring-fed watering hole, like the ones African animals crowd around today. As the climate grew drier, animals had to travel farther and farther to find water. Some got mired in the soft mud and died there, and scavengers came to feed on them, trampling the bones and breaking up the skeletons. Among the finds were three-toed horses about the size of a collie, and a tiny deer-like animal that stood only a foot high.

One more thing from the dig's own brochure: for every hour of fieldwork, the fossil preparers spend twelve or more in the lab.

Point 8 · At the stop

Yellow Mounds Overlook

This is Yellow Mounds Overlook, the most colorful stop on the road.

Those soft yellow mounds began as the floor of the sea. They're an altered version of the oldest rock in the park, the shale laid down by the inland sea. When the sea drained away to the north, the shale that was left behind weathered into soil, and that ancient soil is preserved here. Geologists call it a fossil soil, and the mustard color comes from a mineral called goethite.

Now read the colors from the bottom up. Yellow first: the Yellow Mounds. Then purple: another ancient soil, called the Interior Paleosol. Then gray: the Chadron Formation, from the hot, wet floodplain days. And on top, the striped reddish beds of the Brule. Tens of millions of years, in one glance.

Nearby, Conata Basin Overlook takes in a complete geologic section of the park, with every layer present.

This is an open-hike park, so you're free to walk out among the mounds. Just watch your footing. After rain, the clay turns slick and sticky.

Back to contents ↑

History, on the way there

On the way: Pinnacles Overlook

Next, we're heading to Pinnacles Overlook, the last stop on the tour. Close to it is a pullout called Ancient Hunters Overlook, and it holds the oldest human story on this road.

People have been in and around the Badlands for as long as twelve thousand years, mostly coming to hunt rather than to stay. At Ancient Hunters, a geologic slump created a slightly wetter pocket of ground where trees grow thick. Out of that ground have eroded bits of pottery, arrowheads, worked quartz flakes, a rabbit jaw and bird bones mixed in with the charcoal of old campfires, and bison bones. The arrowheads and the bison bones together suggest it may have been a place where hunters butchered their kill.

The slopes around Pinnacles carry a much newer story. The bighorn sheep that once lived in these badlands, a kind called the Audubon bighorn, are gone, extinct. In January 1964, the park and the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department brought in twelve Rocky Mountain bighorns from Colorado, close relatives of the lost ones, and kept them in a holding pen of three hundred seventy acres. Ten more came the next month.

The first years were hard. Adults and lambs were lost. Then, in the summer of 1967, a respiratory infection swept through the flock, and of twenty-seven sheep, only thirteen survived. That September, the survivors were let out of the pen, and they took to the rough country south of Pinnacles. The park says this is still a popular place for bighorn to gather.

Point 9 · At the stop

Pinnacles Overlook

This is Pinnacles Overlook, the highest point in the park's North Unit, and the last stop on the tour.

The view faces south, which makes this a fine place to watch the sun go down. Spread out below is the Sage Creek Wilderness. On a clear day, the Black Hills show on the horizon. Bison are sometimes visible in the distance, down in the valley or out on the upper prairie. And bighorn sheep like to gather right here. From late April to early May, this is a lambing area, so it's not unusual to see lambs making their way across the rocky slopes.

This spot drew visitors early. From about 1935 to 1950, the Millard family, the same family that built Cedar Pass Lodge, ran a concession here at the Pinnacles.

The Pinnacles Entrance and the town of Wall are close by. If the weather's been dry, the gravel Sage Creek Rim Road runs on along the edge of the wilderness, where bison often roam, and they aren't shy of roads or cars. It can close after heavy rain or snow.

One last thought to take home. Every ridge you've seen today is losing about an inch a year. The next people to come here will see a slightly different park than you did. That's the end of the tour. Thank you for touring the Badlands with me, and enjoy the rest of your time in the park.

Back to contents ↑