Badlands National Park | Visit Rapid City

Badlands National Park, a highly underrated park, continues to be the highlight of a South Dakota vacation for many. As Park Ranger and Paleontologist Ed Welsh says, when you visit the Badlands, you "Kind of experience an Alien World". Discover the beauty of this park, important pieces of its history, and all the unique experiences it offers visitors.

Links:
More information on Badlands National Park: https://www.visitrapidcity.com/blog/one-oddest-places-youll-find-south-dakota
Surrounding Parks & Monuments: https://www.visitrapidcity.com/parks-monuments
Where to Stay When You Visit: https://www.visitrapidcity.com/where-to-stay
More Stops on Your Drive to Rapid City: https://www.visitrapidcity.com/road-rapid-city

Video Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:30 How The Badlands Were Formed
1:07 What Can You Do Here?
1:16 Accessibility
1:49 Camping
2:05 Wildlife
2:25 Ben Reifel Visitors Center
2:33 Native American Culture
2:51 Ben Reifel Visitors Center (cont.)
2:58 Working Paleontology Lab
3:22 Outro

Transcription:
So, Badlands National Park is kind of a unique landscape. People come out here in the Western South Dakota, they see an ocean of grass and all of a sudden there's this dramatic topography change so they get out into this park and kind of experience an alien world.

The Badlands geology kind of skips around in time a little bit. Our lowest layers that are exposed in the western side of the park in the wilderness Area is part of an ancient sea floor. So that tells us we were below sea level. Well eventually what's going to happen at when the dinosaurs are going to die out and after, there's a lot of mountain building events and this all raises the Midwest above sea level. Well that Seaway will drain away and leave a nice lowland basin for other sediment to fill in later, so that kind of sets the stage for the Badlands.

So there’s quite a few things people can do out here. Lots of exploring, they can hike pretty much anywhere they want, we're an open hike park. We try to provide an accessible experience for everybody and with what I think are some of the most impressive views in the area we have areas set up that are wheelchair accessible. Door Trail has a boardwalk Fossil Exhibit Trail our outdoor kind of Natural History Trail. A lot of the signage there has the text but it also has a braille companion text with tangible replicas of fossils people can touch and feel and get a sense of size and shape and texture. People can go camping out here. They can take residents in one of our regular campgrounds. People can go back country camping. As long as they can get out a half mile from any road or trail and aren't visible, they can camp anywhere they want.

There's the large charismatic wildlife, there's bison, there's bighorn sheep, prairie dog towns that are pretty massive. You can find predators: coyotes, bobcats, badgers. Wildlife here is kind of used to vehicles, traffic and people but they are still wild animals.

The Visitor Center has a lot going on. There are exhibits kind of going over the natural history and the cultural history of the area. We're the ancestral home of the Lakota, which still live here, they’re our neighbors, they’re our partners. We have evidence of Native American inhabitants going back about 11,000 - 12,000 years when people were hunting mammoth. We have a gift shop where people can get their mementos or buy books. We have in the summer a working paleontology lab. So we have a preparation lab for fossils and our paleontologists are cleaning up these fossils so they can be used for research study and we often display some of the more interesting ones in this room. Anyone is allowed to come into this room and see paleontology in action.

We're not considered a destination park, we're kind of considered a drive-by park, where people are on their way to or from sites like Mount Rushmore or Yellowstone, but I think word has gotten out of how unique and incredible we are and when people get here they sometimes want to stay here.