Had a long drive from Madison to the Badlands of South Dakota. Always fun to start seeing the scenery change from Midwest to “West”. Beautiful, fragrant drive in through a back entrance to the park around 6pm. Perfect mild/cool temps, lovely dusk-y light, birds chirping, windows down, dirt road into the park, taking deep breaths of the sweet sage all around. After a long day in the car of planning and thinking hard about the next few days, weeks, and months, this magnificent but peaceful moment in the drive calmed us both down and brought us back to the present moment. We both exclaimed at our amazing good fortune to be right where we are, and with so much good stuff in store.
The spectacular, alien features of the Badlands greeted us as we wound our way through the park to the Sage Creek Campground, which is where we camped on our first time in the Badlands last year. Kind of fun to drive in knowing what to expect and seeing familiar sights. Just as lovely as I remember it. Probably lovelier because we’re here about a month earlier than last year and it’s a little cooler and spring flowers are in full bloom.
The small, open campground loop of Sage Creek featured a greeting buffalo. Right smack in the middle of the circle of tents was a lone, grazing buffalo. We quickly parked and threw the tent up, then stood together and watched the buffalo as a couple of (stupid) overeager campers approached much too closely for a photo. The buffalo snorted and tossed his head at them, even casually charged at them, moving his enormous mass with surprising agility. For a second I thought something really ugly was about to happen, but luckily the (stupid) people got the idea and moved well out of his way. Eventually, the buffalo grazed in our direction and we had to move politely out of his way as he grazed within about 15 feet of our tent.
We took a short walk up a nearby hill, which we’d explored on our previous visit. Ryan pointed out different sage varietals to me and we smelled them to pick our favorite as we watched the last light slowly creep across the Badlands in the distance.
Took a short scenic hike the next morning, the ‘Notch Trail’, just to fit in a little sightseeing before we had to hit the road. Laughed about how extremely over prepared we were for the ~1.5 mile walk, with our camelbak water systems and backpacking boots on. Nothing to look at here, just a couple of REI yuppies, folks. Don’t worry, we’ll look like pros real soon, y’all!
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