Seven Days Away

Len and I went to South Dakota’s Badlands and Black Hills and we are just back. Got the laundry done and cat fur vacuumed but we haven’t yet given the grandkids their dinosaur sets from the South Dakota School of Mining Geology Museum gift shop. (here) This is one of my fav gift shopping places on earth. It’s a very small place with hats, toys, books, and lots and lots of rocks – everything a girl’s heart desires.

You already know how a trip goes. You imagine “packing just right” so you have enough and yet you can still carry it. We did alright. Two pairs of jeans, t-shirts and underwear, the electric toothbrush stand with attached gum irrigator and a sleep apnea machine. Boomer accessories. 

Speaking of being old now, the first time I laughed out loud on this trip was barely an hour from home when we stopped at an expressway rest area. 10AM on a Tuesday and SO MANY RETIRED PEOPLE! The kids are back in school; it isn’t winter yet; I guess this is the time for us to travel hither and yon. I swear there were a hundred wrinkled people milling inwards and then milling back out. I saw a Beatles AND Rolling Stones t-shirts, on different guys, in the same minute.

This was my seventh Badlands trip, Len’s sixth. My dad and mom drove (in a non-air conditioned car, how did we survive?) our family of five from Michigan to the Seattle World’s Fair the year I was nine. Dad DID get off 90 to drive the Badlands Loop though we barely got out of the car. I still remember my kid heart on fire to get out and touch and climb those crumbling, dusty hills – and I’ve not yet lost my yearning for vast, gorgeous, empty, full places. Actually, the Badlands are one of the reasons Len and I had to marry each other. The rest of the world yearns for Caribbean cruises but what we crave are pinnacles and camel humps along a distant blue horizon. 

So yeah, we had many wondrous moment on this trip. I will tell you about two of them. And also, JIC you might go this direction someday, some honorary mentions. 

The first day we were there (we stayed in Wall, which is a handy eight miles from the west entrance) we got up early to watch sunrise. We hiked several hours on one end of the Castle Trail. Then we went back to our motel to take naps and showers and that night we drove back out to watch the sun set and stayed long enough for stars to come out. Or more accurately, for our planet to rotate until our side of the planet turned its back from the face of the sun - like a tango dancer spinning into a swishing, swirling solo. 

And when that happens, you can lay flat on the sidewalk of the Pinnacles Overlook because it’s very dark and barely anyone else is left in that parking lot. Just one couple talking to each other with the same quiet awe in their voices as Len and I had in ours. Strangely warm winds blew out of the canyons and gullies as the Milky Way bloomed over our heads. I’ve seen photos of it all my life but that night, there it was, the soft glow of zillions of stars strewn like a pale velvet sash across the whole sky. Oh man, that was something.

The next morning we hiked the other end of Castle Trail. We climbed gravelly inclines and slid back down (sometimes on my butte, hah) following from one pole marker to the next. These paths are not wide nor are they maintained. The park service pounds in the skinny, red-painted steel poles and then hikers make the path that goes from one to the next. Watch where you are going because the path is rarely even. At the same time, watch the dazzling hills and sky around you because life is short and this memory will need to last.

We’d been hiking twenty minutes when I veered onto a side path that encircled what rangers and scientists call ‘sod tables’ but what look like the top of Bart Simpson’s head. 

The grass on top of sod tables absorb water better than the dirt and rocks, so those Bart heads protect the badlands topography beneath them, which is how they are formed. Thus they also protect whatever’s in the dirt. When storms come, the sides of the sod tables are lashed by wind and rain so some dirt washes away and this exposes new stuff. 

There had been storms in this area lately, which is why and how I discovered an actual, genuine fossil! It was at the corner of the sod table and was very tiny - yet it looked like what it is, a teeny bone. My heart raced as I gaped and called to Len. A bit of our entire universe right there in front of me, a remnant that (the ranger told me later) could be up to a half million years old. 

I knew enough to be both astonished - and to not pick it up. Len figured the coordinates of where we were and we took photos. We told the rangers later that day plus filled out their fossil discovery form at Ben Reifel headquarters. When I’m done with this article I will also complete their online form and include this. So if YOU want to say something, write a comment and you, too, can be one bird bone in the Grand Chronicles of the Whole Universe.

We continued our hike which was long, hard, and spectacular.

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There’s backstory to how we ended up in the Bijou Hills - though like most successful vacation stories it’s mostly funny just to us. Hint - our kids talk darkly about “Dad’s short cuts.” Len invented a short cut to get us off US 90 going home by dropping south - and hours later we were in northeast Nebraska. 

In between we were so far off the beaten track that at 1PM we passed a car and we wouldn’t see another one until nearly 3PM. I was driving a small highway when I noticed an unexpectedly high range of hills to my left. This is flat corn country. Why those rocky hills?

Just then a gravel road appeared to my left; it led into the hills. I asked Len if we should try it. He said, as he has often said at the beginning of adventures we didn’t know we were starting, “Sure, why not?” 

Len looked at his phone. No internet. Looked at our road atlas. We were in the Bijou Hills. 

Later we learned this area included an actual town but as of the 2010 census, only three people still live here and, sadly, one of them has passed. This area has fields of grass and corn and a few marshes that extend to the horizon. Apparently this place is popular during duck hunting season. For people who have 4WD.

Those high, rock-strewn hills were beside us. We drove up and over them yet they were still there. They’re topped by quartzite (I learned later) which is harder than the rest of this area, so as eons rolled on and the land eroded, the hills stayed. We didn’t stop to hike because, in theory, we were driving home. Later I read a comment from a woman who grew up there decades ago; she lamented that she didn’t walk the hills the summer she visited because it was rattlesnake season. Yikes!

We drove and drove that long, straight, gravel road. So much dust that I couldn’t see out our rear window. Len looked at google maps (which work even when the internet doesn’t). It said there was a traffic slowdown on our road which was very weird because we were the only ones on it. Until we realized WE were the slow traffic the satellite was tracking. 

We took photos of the few collapsing houses and barns. After nearly an hour on his desolate road we found a crossroad - also dust and gravel - so we crossed it to keep driving straight. That’s where the gravel and dust turned into ruts with tall weeds in the middle that brushed the bottom of the car. And then, ahead, was a muddy-looking dip where the road skimmed past a slough.

I turned around in multiple tiny back and forths so I wouldn’t fall off the ruts and get stuck. We found the other gravel road and twenty minutes later we found a macadam road and that was that. That evening I looked at Google maps. When we left our motel that morning we were nine hours from home. By taking our shortcut, we were now, end of day, eight and a half hours from home. 

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I discovered a fossil smaller than my little finger. We waylaid ourselves in dust, gravel, fields, and a desolate ridge of rattlesnake hills. These moments won’t change my life or yours. I can’t even high advise you to check out the Bijou Hills because, in truth, I guess they were not too remarkable. 

The thing that catches me, and maybe catches you, are moments when you are trying to say yes to the life around you, when you are trying to ‘see’ more than to ‘get’. You decide to take yourself to a place that might ruffle your particular spirit. You hang out, do a sweaty hike, wear sun screen and sunglasses and a stupid hat (I left my smart hat at home, so much for ‘perfect packing’). You do the best you can to get out of your routine for a bit, and pay attention, and let what you don’t understand lead you off your beaten path. 

And the universe is right here, waving it’s arms, shining its stars, flicking bird bones and quartz pebbles and hot winds at you. It’s a good day to be startled and mystified.

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Side things:

The DQ in Wall, SD. The teenage boy at the window asks about your day and I think he means it. We were there two full day and yes, we have three hot fudge sundae receipts.

Don’t go to Spearfish. In the past ten years it has been taken over by dot-com millionaires. The traffic was Chicago-worthy; the wait to eat at the lovely lodge was twenty people and more than an hour long. We ate peanut butter sandwiches in the parking lot and left. 

The South Dakota School of Mines Geology Museum is not flashy but IS quietly fascinating. A lot of what I wrote today I learned in about a half hours’ worth of wandering and reading in there. 

The Akta Lakota Museum in Brule County (Chamberlain), SD is about ten minutes north of the interstate and it explains the historical lives of Lakota, plus displays modern art pieces. Also, their gift shop is gorgeous, expensive, and worth it.  

The Best Western in Fort Dodge, Iowa, was exceptionally nice. You probably aren’t going to Ft. Dodge, but if you do, check it out. The nicest and least expensive place we stayed. 

Driving east out of Nebraska we crossed the Niobrara River, which (I just looked it up) is an indigenous Ponca phrase for “wide-spreading river”. It was braids of mucky river bottom, grass, rivulets of shallow water, and SO MANY BIRDS WITH LONG LEGS who were busily fishing. If a person was a birder, this might be a gran place to explore. Or perhaps you already know about it. I’m not a birder though some of my favorite people are thus affected. 

Len tells me that next time we want to see quartzite-topped hills like the Bijou Hills, the Waterloo Quartzite Outcrops State Natural Area is not far from Madison, WI. Who knew?

Right now (10/4/2025) most national parks are open although their staffs are severely cut and their buildings (questions! bathrooms! You found a fossil!) are shut. Write to your congress people. This is nuts.