Badlands: The Wall at the Edge of the Plains
Near Wall, South Dakota
About an hour east of Rapid City on Interstate Ninety, the grassland abruptly ends at a cliff. The Badlands Wall drops two hundred fifty feet into a moonscape of eroded spires, gullies, and fluted ridges in shades of pink, gray, and cream. The formations took about five hundred thousand years to erode from deposits laid down when this region sat at the bottom of an inland sea.
Fossil beds here have produced more Oligocene mammal species than anywhere on earth, including ancient three-toed horses and saber-toothed cats. The Lakota called this landscape Mako Sica, bad lands, a practical description of terrain that resisted travel and farming. When the French-Canadian fur traders arrived in the early eighteen hundreds they translated it directly: les mauvaises terres.
The park protects about two hundred forty-three thousand acres and is still actively eroding, losing about an inch of rock per year.
