Vershun’s Brain Dump

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.