Running in Badlands National Park, South Dakota

I ran a little over 10 km here. Again it was raining and windy but somehow I managed to find a 2 hour window where running was perfect. And the route I choose was part of a trail system through the Badlands and it was dry enough that I did not have any mud problems. The last leg (about a quarter mile) was extremely steep back down to the parking lot where the car was waiting for me. It was about as steep as a ladder might be when you climb onto your roof at home but thick with crevices and tortuously twisted. Running down it I picked up so much speed that I felt I would fall off an unseen cliff so I had to check myself. It was like going down a water slide with short sharp turns that you could not see beyond. I found I could check my speed by literally bouncing off the wall which formed the outside of the bends. It was almost a tunnel, that’s how narrow that path was. I was very lucky because AFTER my run it began raining very hard and that trail turned to soupy mud. There is absolutely no way you could climb up or down that clayey silty hill when it was wet no matter what kind of equipment you had.

I only met a couple of other people in the back country that were rather startled to see some idiot running with nothing but a water bottle. Where had I come from and where was I going? I actually got to the car and went back up that hill looking for Marilyn who was just coming down after doing her explorations. It was she who took most of the pictures.

Our campsite was away from the tourist center. We camped at Sage Creek campground, a site with only pit toilets. We had to bring our own water. It is an undeveloped site which most people use as a departure point for camping in the back country. While we were there we saw only a few people. We were totally alone for most of the time. As you can see in the picture below, we put up tarps on the “covered wagon” style picnic tables to shield us from the wind and rain. When we finally left this campsite we packed up in the pouring rain and ended up getting stuck in the mud. Marilyn had to push so I could get to the gravel road a hundred feet away.

The buffalo were plentiful and often wandered through and around the camp, seemingly ignoring the presence of people, yet still avoiding them. The calves looked not unlike normal cattle when young. The rule is…stay away, at least a hundred feet away.

Here is a buffalo rubbing tree we found on one of our hikes into the hills near our camp, and also a buffalo wallow. The tree had buffalo hair attached to it and the brown spot was highly polished and probably had a lot of brown buffalo hair oil on it.

There were certainly more pronghorns than people is some places we visited:

We climbed the brilliantly colored hills above our camp, often having to wait until the bison cleared an area or if we were impatient we took long detours around the bison. There was a lot of spectacular scenery of course!