The White River: Carrying the Badlands to the Missouri

The land around the Badlands drains into a river that most travelers never notice clearly, though it is always nearby. The White River rises in the pine ridge country of northwestern Nebraska and flows east across the southern edge of Badlands National Park, through the Pine Ridge Reservation, and eventually into the Missouri River near the town of Chamberlain. The river gave its name to the White River Group, a set of sedimentary layers that make up most of what you see in the Badlands formations.

Those layers are tinted in shades of gray, cream, and pale pink by the volcanic ash and minerals deposited onto the ancient landscape over millions of years and eventually compacted into stone. The White River today runs pale gray to almost white, carrying the light-colored sediment of the Badlands with it downstream. Locals say you can read the formations in the water: the river is dissolving them, carrying them away a grain at a time, on a slow journey toward the Missouri and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.

The White River is too silty and shallow for navigation and too remote for significant irrigation. It serves mainly as the drainage pipe for the badlands, the system that moves the slowly eroding landscape downstream. Geologists estimate that the Badlands formations are eroding by as much as about one inch a year in bare areas, which means the landscape you see today is measurably different from the one seen by the first European explorers, and will be measurably different again in another thousand years.