The Badlands, Reading Forty-Seven Million Years

There is a particular hour in the Badlands, just after sunrise or just before dark, when the light comes in flat and the buttes go red and purple and the shadows pool in the gullies like standing water. In that light, the formations look alive, and in a geological sense, they are. The Badlands are eroding at roughly one inch per year. The formations you see today did not look this way a century ago. They will not look this way a century from now. The landscape is in constant motion, surrendering itself to wind and rain with a patience that makes the human timescale feel very small.

What the erosion is revealing took millions of years to accumulate. The sediments of the White River Badlands contain one of the world's richest fossil beds: the bones of creatures that lived here when this region was a subtropical swamp, then a dry woodland, then an open grassland. Titanotheres the size of modern rhinoceroses. Three-toed horses no larger than a dog. Saber-toothed cats. The Oglala Lakota, who have lived alongside these formations for generations, called this place Mako Sica, meaning land bad or land difficult to travel. French-Canadian fur trappers later rendered the same idea as les mauvaises terres. Both names stuck.

The Badlands National Park protects about two hundred forty-three thousand acres and is home to one of the largest protected mixed-grass prairies remaining in the country. Black-footed ferrets, reintroduced here in the nineteen nineties after near extinction, are raising kits in the prairie dog towns. The bison herd, descended from animals brought back from captivity, numbers over one thousand. The land is doing what lands do when given room, slowly, stubbornly returning to itself.