Location Taken: Badlands National Park, South Dakota
Time Taken: June 2010
There are some parts of the world that are very flat.
There are some parts of the world that are very bumpy.
And then there’s the parts of the world that are both at once.
Badlands National Park is in South Dakota, one of the states with vast swaths of grasslands going on for miles. And as you drive in, that’s what you see, flat grasslands.
And then, you slowly realize that the horizon is closer than it used to be.
The land falls off into the complex erosional patterns that make the Badlands into a National Park without a hint of warning. Which isn’t too surprising, since all the Badlands are is the edge of one layer of material eroding away in complex patterns, revealing the layer below.
The tops of both layers are quite nice and flat. Once you look past the carved edifices, the land quickly returns to grasslands stretching to the horizon.
But, for that brief span of land, things are not at all flat.
The place earned its name because it was a bad land to travel through, much less live in. The drop-offs are sudden, the hills are too steep for anything but ankle-breaking, and the soil isn’t that great for farming even. All it was was an irritating bit of land that you’d have to go miles out of your way to get around.
But then the environmental movements that spawned the National Park system cropped up, and all of a sudden the Badlands became a good land for tourism. People came long distances, by train and horse wagon at first, then by airplane and car, just to see this piece of worthless land that just happened to be rather beautiful and unique.
Not that I’m that fond of Badlands National Park, mind you. You need very specific lighting to get enough contrast in this pale rock to really show off the features in a photo. And looking at it from above, which is where a lot of the viewing places are located, is a rather poor angle for the feature. Plus it suffers from the lack of a sense of scale that photography enforces on land features this large.
It is possible to get excellent photos of this place, I’m sure. But you have to get down into the twists and turns to get a good angle, and then either wait for the right light or manipulate it some with some artificial lights. Which, alas, is not what someone just stopping in for a few photos in the hour allotted for such things can manage.
