Visiting Badlands National Park in South Dakota

I'll Tell You Where the Buffalo Are!

We recently returned from a family trip to Badlands National Park, in South Dakota. This was the first time this New Yorker had ever been to the Wild West, and it is a trip that my family and I will never forget. We spent one full day in Badlands National Park, and felt that that made for a nice exploration.

My teenage sons love animals, and when one of them expressed an interest in seeing wild animals, such as bison, that became one of our primary motivations for arranging the trip. In addition, my husband had wonderful memories of the trip he had taken to the Badlands as a child, so he was eager to return with his own family.

We traveled in August. Although I had read reports of people complaining about the summer heat there, we got lucky, in that the weather was cooler than usual, and very breezy. We were quite comfortable.

Driving around the Loop Road, our jaws dropped as we stopped at nearly every viewing station. The geological rock formations, deep crevices, and buttes, interspersed with vast, open grassy prairie were something out of a science fiction movie. The cliffs were at once breathtaking, incredible and yet deeply frightening (at least to me, perhaps because I don't love heights). The four of us snapped hundreds of photographs, and we kept going back and forth between using our cameras and our binoculars.

The colors of the rock formations were unbelievable, as well. Stripes of bright white and pink, bases of yellow, gray and brown. The grassy prairie held more textures and colors as well: wheat-colored fields, grasses in shades of green and a remarkable blue.