The Badlands!

"The Badlands”. It sounds so sinister.

Gunslingers come to mind. Fugitives with festering shootout wounds. All the dramas and suspense of a bleak and brutal wild west saga.

It’s easily endorsed by the reaction you get when you say you’re going to the Badlands of South Dakota. It’s invariably a gasp.

Now I learn that they gasp with envy.

The Badlands is absolutely spectacular.

It is one of America’s great natural wonders.

For Aussies, it is America’s answer to the Breakaways and the Painted Desert.

It is called the Badlands because is is not arable land. It is a vast mass of fragile eroded peaks and valleys.

It is really layers and layers of sediment, glorious in the history it

has preserved and can show off, but absolutely of no agricultural potential. It was deeply disappointing to the early American pioneers; of course, not so to the indigenous Indian tribes. For them it is a marvel of sacred land.

And today, it has achieved that sort of status for the American people.

It is a marvel and people come to marvel. They come in droves.

They are really nice people. The American people we encounter out on the roads being tourists in their own country seem uniformly to be intelligent, curious, polite, friendly and just downright beaut.

We are lucky. The day we arrive at the Badlands National Park is one of those perfect days which precede a

storm.

Like so many things in America, the Badlands experience is all very sleekly organised.

The roads and good and there are lots of designated lookouts. Lots.

There are lots of people at the each lookout and everyone looks out for each other very politely. There is plenty of room, after all.

Everyone is just in awe of what they are seeing.

I take photographs. Everyone is snapping madly. Selfie sticks are out by the score.

But nothing truly captures the perspective, the

sense of pure perilousness of the Badlands.

Bruce describes them rather nicely as “a parfait of banded coloured soils placed in scoops upon the landscape”.

We drive along the curving road, stopping frequently. We realise that we are on a high plateau and The Badlands are below us - vertiginously! It is really quite hairy.

While some of the viewing points are constructed lookouts, many are just walks onto the upper levels with

gullies just veering away down the sides, steep and nubbly and soft.

Erosion has made some fascinating sculptural shapes.

In some parts where the road winds in between the formations instead of above them, they rise in pinnacles and spires. Gaudi-esque, one could almost say. Glorious works of art.

We just do the proper thing. We drive. We stop. We walk onto the

dramatic promontories following the trodden earth carefully. It is amazing people have not fallen down the deep and precipitous ravines to either side. Amazing. There are no guard rails or anything to warn visitors. The American national park people have not defiled the drama of the landscape but allowed danger to be part of the experience.

Sometimes the road comes alarmingly close to a canyon. I mean, suddenly it is there out the

window. One wonders, with the powers of erosion, when the road will fall into the canyon. Not today, whew. We roll onwards.

We stop to walk The Fossil Trail, a meandering boardwalk which describes the fossil history found in the Badlands and represents the assorted fossils in superb bronze facsimiles on the information boards. It explains the geological timeline - and one can look at the formations’ striations and literally see time.

Oh yes, the Badlands are really good.