The Badlands

Before we left home I thought the Badlands was a large area of SD and assumed it was basically a huge desert area. My first belief was wrong and the second sort of wrong too. Anyway, we entered Badlands National Park by the Western side of the loop that is about 30 miles long. The Badlands is larger than this 30 miles but nowhere near as large as I thought. (BTW, the name apparently comes from French explorers who said this is a "bad land to cross".
The west area of the park has viewpoints that look down into canyons of rock worn away by wind and rain and sand - sort of like a mini grand canyon look, with obvious layers of rocks showing - reds and beige. It's a beautiful place but other canyons we've seen are prettier. As you drive east the entire park changes - no longer are the cut away sections below you but they rise above you in gigantic formations reminiscent of the rocks in Arizona and Utah. Again, other places have more beautiful formations but these are also magnificent. I think the real appreciation didn't come to me until we'd left the park and continued along route 90. You see, coming West to East we were coming from areas where rock formations like these are common. But, as you travel East you realize the explorers and settlers had been heading West and travelling thousands of miles of prarie. Level, grassy areas and then suddenly rocks hundreds of feet high appeared before them - a bad land to cross indeed! Climbing these rocks would be difficult never mind bringing wagons over them. Then, just when the high formations are traverssed, travellers had to deal with the opposite formations - large rocky canyons. Hard to imagine.
The Badlands are amazing and beautiful in their own right but when considered as they obstacle they are, they take on even greater significance. A definite place to see.