Home from The Badlands

5/16/2022

Yes, Len and I are back (a week ago) from a wonderful vacation in South Dakota. We stayed four nights in an Airbnb in Wasta, SD, which we picked it because it’s close to the west entrance of Badlands National Park. After we chose it, we discovered it was hugely inexpensive, so if you want to know more about the place, I assure you there is only one Airbnb in Wasta, SD (population 65). The house was tiny, clean, had adequate hot water, and a completely functional kitchen. When the TV wouldn’t work the evening after cable guys had been burying cables that morning, we called the owner who lives 18 miles north and she drove over immediately. Of course, by the time she arrived the cable had kicked back in because that’s how things work in the real world, right? Pam was super pleasant and helpful.

When Len and I dated we talked about how much we loved wide open plains. Here at this end of our long marriage, this trip felt a bit like time travelling backwards. We kidded about who we thought we were going to become and how that worked out. We recalled funny things from bringing our kids here when they were little.

Beng able to remember good times together is a luxury.

Castle Trail crosses the center of the northern unit of the park. We walked most of it; one day from the east end while wearing our parkas, two days later day from the west end wearing shorts while dripping sweat. The second hike we brought peanut butter and banana sandwiches and sat on the side of a formation and ate while gazing at the amazing lunar scenery all around us. Later we ate Fig Newtons at Saddle Pass, elevation 300’ - there were Dall sheep grazing while we did that.

Being in the Badlands is chilly mornings and then the hot sun. It's the wind blowing past one’s ears. It's hearing the mumbling of fellow hikers a half mile away. It's quartz rocks just lying there where nature dropped them a hundred floods ago. It fills your spirit. The wind drowns the chatter in your head. You get to walk around and be there and that is practice for how to live anywhere.

We saw those curved horn Dall sheep, bazillions of perky prairie dogs, bison with their babies, and one coyote trotting through a prairie too fast for Len to get a photo. Which is how you know it was a Wiley coyote.

We’ve been home a week and on-going life is packed. Trying to write some other projects. One kid just moved. A grand-boy is having a birthday party next week. A new grandchild had surgery and is fine. I can’t keep up but I am trying hard to hear the wind whooshing past my ears as I live my lucky life.

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I have 200 pretty good photos and here we go with hardly any of them.