Interior: The Smallest Gateway to the Strangest Landscape
Near Interior, South Dakota
The town of Interior is easy to miss. It has a gas station, a small motel, a campground, and a scattering of homes along a road that leads into one of the most visited national parks in the country. The population sits at about sixty-five people, which makes it one of the smallest incorporated municipalities in South Dakota, possibly in the nation.
The name carries a story that sounds invented: The town took the name Interior in eighteen ninety-three, when a former way station was renamed, though the story behind the choice is unclear. Whether that was a geographic fact or a civic boast, the name suited the isolation. Interior sits in Jackson County, which is one of the most sparsely populated counties east of the Rocky Mountains, with roughly one and a half people per square mile.
The nearest hospital is an hour away. Cell service is unreliable. The nearest grocery store is a long drive.
And yet on summer mornings, the road past Interior's gas station carries a steady stream of vehicles heading for the park, and the park receives more than a million visitors every year. What draws them is the landscape to the south and west, the formations of the Badlands, eroded buttes and spires and gullies in shades of gray and cream and pink, a terrain that looks like no other place in North America. The Lakota people called it Mako Sica, meaning land bad, and the French trappers who came after translated that as Mauvaises Terres, from which the English word badlands descended.
But the formations are only part of what Interior is a gateway to. Farther south lies the park's southern section, the Stronghold Unit, which lies entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and has a history separate from the better-known northern formations. That unit was an aerial gunnery range for the United States military during World War Two.
It holds some of the park's most isolated and historically layered terrain. The park's wilderness area to the north is open prairie where bison move without a fence line in any direction. Interior is easy to miss.
It is also, in its own small way, the door to a great deal.
