3:30 AM and not looking like we’ll get done anytime soon.
Really looking forward to some R&R in North Carolina this weekend.
Today was the first time I realized my month-long trip turned out to be my permanent move. C’est la vie.
Too many places to see, too many people to meet, too many things to do to root myself in any way.
Cincinnati until September 1st then I’m off to the Maine to work my way down the east coast. Life is pretty damn exciting when you situate yourself in it correctly.
Hiked back to my car from the Badlands. Pretty uneventful except for the smell, which was epic in all the wrong ways. I also collapsed at my car in an overly-dramatic display of tiredness which made a couple campers ask if I was OK.
Drove to Sioux City, Iowa. On one of the back roads (I couldn’t stand the farmland of I-90 I went through the town of Gayville, which I was immature enough to laugh at but but unfortunately a little too mature to stop and take pictures.
Been staying at Sam’s house for the past couple house. Been great in pretty much every respect except for me falling flat into a clover bowl at the skatepark here. I’m still limping but it’s a little less noticeable.
Sam, Morgan, and Ross kicking back before a bomb ass dinner of chicken, potatoes, and pure deliciousness.
It should be noted:
Sam is a fucking ninja.
I woke up fully around 8:30 AM after a few hours of drifting in and out of sleep to the early morning’s warmth. The sun was already high in the sky when I came out of my tent. Late start. After eating a quick breakfast of oatmeal I packed up my daypack and went down to my giving tree to try to find my throwing star. After about 10 minutes I found it stuck in some brush about 15 yards behind the tree. Its weight and circular design and made it bounce off a lot further than I expected. A quick round of throws and then I was off, headed toward some Brule formations I could see far in the distance.
As a came to the crest of a fairly large, gradually sloping hill an enormous valley opened up before me. A small herd of buffalo were grazing and the Badlands rose on the other side behind them.
In no way does this picture do the valley justice. Its enormity cannot be captured on film. The barely visible dark dots in the upper left-middle are enormous bison. The Badlands cut the horizon.
It took me a while to trudge through the valley. Even though I avoided the bison by a fairly large margin (I’m not sure what the temperament of bison are, but I sure and hell didn’t want to find out), they still got spooked and ran off behind a hill.
The bison running off. Them being scared of me was a happy twist I wasn’t expecting.
Getting across the valley took longer than I thought. The ground was soft like all the rock in the Badlands, but there were sections where the desert-like ground was saturated with water and became mud as slippery as ice.
The transition between the dry, caked ground and the wet, caked skating rink.
“Funny” thing about the badlands is when you look across the valleys leading up to them it looks like a straight shot. However , in a lot of places the valleys just sinks down into a canyon that you have to navigate around the edge to find a good place to drop in and come out of on the other side. You can’t see these from any sort of distance away because the valley continues happily at the other side of the canyon at the same height. It’s not until you’re within a quarter mile that you notice the valley isn’t continuous and you should start watching your step for deep holes and cliffs as you approach the canyon.
One of the many “canyons” you have to navigate through to reach the other side of the valley.
I finally came out of a canyon and reached my destination for the day, the outer skirts of the Badlands. I decided to climb up the nearest formation to me and get a better look before I started heading back.
The formation I was going for is directly in the upper middle-right.
Getting up it proved to be extremely tricky. With every 10 steps or so following the razor-sharp ridge the ground would give out on me and I’d end up sliding a few feet down the steep slope until I caught myself with my hands or flattened my feet enough to stop the slide. As I got toward the top the slope steepened which dropped off nearly vertically a couple hundred feet. I was only about 20 yards from the top, but I promised a couple people very important to be that I would ignore my natural disposition of being an idiot and be careful. I also figured that being around 10 miles from the nearest other human was reason enough not to risk a fall. Where I was offered a pretty decent view anyway.
From the near-top of the Badlands formation thinger I climbed up.
I was still pretty sore about not going that extra little distance on my way down until I slipped and slid about 10 feet toward the edge of the drop, stopping a 5 or so yards about it by flattening out my entire body on the slope.
As I made my way back through the canyon I was 2 jumps from getting back on the prairie when I came across this guy.
I was going to wear apples on my ankles to remind these guys why they lost their goddamn legs.
Was about a 4-5 footer. Not sure if that’s big or not but the fact that in a couple seconds I would’ve jumped on him was enough to give me a little bit of a scare.
As I circled around him checking him out (this was my first encounter with a rattler and I wanted to make sure I remembered what they look like exactly in case I saw another in the prairie), once again I had to fight back my overwhelming urge to provoke it into rattling at me. What’s an encounter with a rattlesnake if it just sits there? But fictional images of springing snakes flying through the air and biting my jugular where soon floating through my mind and I figured it’d probably be best to just leave him be.
When I got back to camp I still had some time so I went down and threw around the knives again and read “The Road,” which turned out to be pretty morbidly bleak and fairly high on the awesome scale. I splurged and ate one of my freeze-dried spaghetti dinners and it was delish.
Sleep came quickly, thank God.
The next day I decided to stop by “Wall Drug,” South Dakota. I’ve been seeing billboards for this place for nearly 100 miles and my curiosity overcame me when I found out it was the same exit as the one I was taking to get to the Badlands.
Wall Drug is pretty much just a small, rustic mall located in Wall, South Dakota. A major tourist attraction, no doubt, but for someone with little use of novelty gifts it wasn’t that spectacular. I did, for whatever reason, get suckered into buying throwing knives and a throwing star. Awesome.
Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota. The man in the bottom-right is very representative of the kinds of folks there.
I made it to the Badlands fairly early and had time to take drive around the “scenic loop.” The Badlands hold a myriad of geologically interesting formations, with the eroded buttes and spires being the most impressive. It reminded me a little of Moab, but instead of the hard sandstone and solitary giants of Utah’s desert, these were crumbling and all clustered together; societies of withering exiles.
Looking into the Badlands. Brule formations in the distance.
Even if you aren’t using the primitive camping lot, the Sage Creek road is worth going down just for some of the views it offers and some up-close-and-personal bison encounters.
I don’t think I’ll be stopping at this overlook.
The primitive campsite is situated in a valley pretty far from the fun desert-like formations I saw earlier. A few bison grazed fairly close to my car. I hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.
So off I went. Open trail policies are awesome, especially in this kind of habitat. The prairie is so wide and gentle you can see your destination off in the distance and beeline straight to it with minimal amount of meandering. I set out toward the center of the park.
I stopped a few miles in when I reached the “yellow hills.” I have no idea of their real name but my goal was to reach them and when I did I happily set up camp. The wind was constant and unforgiving. Every time I raised my tent even a little it would fly up in the air, mockingly waving goodbye to me as I gripped it tight before it flew away.
Noob mistake, I forgot the damn stakes. I loaded up all my stuff into the tent to keep it from blowing away and tried to get some sleep.
The tent violently shifted in the wind, sometimes getting blown so hard the side of it pushed firmly against my nose as I lay on my sleeping bag. Impossible to sleep; it was like being the star in a rebirth ceremony.
I decided to hike around camp a bit. I grabbed my knives and star and found a tree about a half mile away. It ran right next to a “creek.” I use the term loosely. All the water that I saw there is still-standing and impossible to drink due to its extremely high content of minerals. You can’t see an inch beneath the surface and that’s about as deep as the water gets anyway. Note that you have to pack in all of your own water, a concept I wasn’t familiar with and the 3 gallons I brought in weighed me down heavily. Down at the tree the wind was less intense and I was able to relax and bit and through around my new toys.
I lost my star, and the remaining hour or so before I had to go back to camp was desperately searching the grasses for it. Sucked.
There are quite a few animals out and about for a climate so harsh. Deer, antelope, jack rabbits, bison, and a myriad of birds of which I heard more than I saw. Bison shit everywhere. I reeked of it and so did my tent; it was impossible to get away from. In the fading light an antelope appeared on a nearby hill and made the weirdest noise I’ve heard coming from an animal. Grunting into a kazoo would probably make a similar noise.
Sleep came in spurts. In the middle of the night I walked out of my tent and saw the entire landscape illuminated by the moon, giving everything a light blue tint.
I take the first step of a million more,
and I’ll make mistakes I’ve never made before,
but at least I’m moving forward.
-Hoobastank
On the 14th I drove up to Rapid City, South Dakota. The drive was surprisingly beautiful, and with no obstructions to block the horizon the sky looked bigger than ever.
A little into Wyoming the landscape began to change. To call the perturbations of the land hills is perhaps giving them too much credit, but the ground rolled and flowed like a thin piece of fabric blowing in the breeze.
The sky had a million small clouds that seemed to mirror the prairies below. Standing on the top of a ripple gave you impression that the land and sky connected far off in the distance; that the land glided from underneath your feet into the horizon and returned to you different but similar far above your head.
My hope was to make it to the Badlands that day, but inclement weather and the fading day prevented me from getting there. Instead, when I got to Rapid City, I called up my wonderful friend Liz who actually grew up in the city and she gave me a memory-guided voice tour of the place. The difference between east and west Rapid City is night and day, and if you come up from the south east as I did I can’t stress enough that you should go at least a little east down highway 44. It’s gorgeous in the Black Hills. As the sun was setting on them I was able to see many small deer, cautiously watching me as I drove by.
I ended up in a hotel just east of Rapid City on I-90. Barely serviceable internet and a lukewarm hot tub.
Tomorrow I embark on an epic journey: driving to Ohio.
It’s not really epic and a Journey is a stretch (JUST A SMALL-TOWN GIRL), but I’ll be gone for a while and the unfortunate fact is I’ll probably write about it. More unfortunately, you’re reading about it.
My first stop, which I hope to be at tomorrow, is South Dakota’s Badlands. Since it’s a desert climate (I guess), I shouldn’t have to worry too much about the rain. More importantly though, I won’t have to worry about bears.
I’ve never really encountered a bear so I can’t tell you how or when my irrational fear came about, but I’ve camped fairly extensively in the Colorado Rockies and I’m always afraid a bear will come into my tent and eat my face. Maybe it’s their size, their horrifying teeth, or the teddy bear I owned as a child that told me to burn things, but something about me and bears just don’t click.
What’s more irrational, however, is my complete disregard of the danger of mountain lions. I’m pretty sure more people are mauled by mountain lions than bears, but there’s something about the fact that they’re kitty cats that really makes them seem inferior. When you encounter a mountain lion you’re supposed to look big, yell, throw rocks at it… whatever. You SCARE the big predator away. Psh. Try that to a grizzly.
A fantastic twist of fate would be if I got attacked by a mountain lion and bear attacks it, saving my life in the process. I’d still hunt it down and kill it though. Fucking bears.
So back to the Badlands. Evidently the most dangerous wildlife there are rattlesnakes, which live in abundance. I’m not quite sure how to handle this, but my guess is when you hear rattling you should move away from the source. I also assume if you’re bitten it’s socially acceptable to bite back.
From what I gather my experience camping in the Badlands will look something like this:
(I hope you appreciate that screenshot because despite my absolute ridiculous awesomeness with all things Super Mario it took me 20 minutes to get to World 6).
Rereading what I wrote so far has shown me that I have to go to bed. Drivel.
Check back (it’ll be more interesting I’m just setting the bar low… or something).