Tag: badlands

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A Tradition of Stewardship

By Michael Zimny

On a Sunday in June, a group of former Boy Scouts and troop leaders gathered at an austere grave site, hidden in a corner of Badlands National Park, and commemorated the interred with a Psalm reading and a chorus of”The Old Rugged Cross.”

The grave is where the Tyree family — who homesteaded in the Tyree Basin before it became incorporated into a national park — buried Eugene Tyree, who lived only a few hours after his birth in 1916. His twin brother Howard survived.

The Tyrees migrated to this arid landscape from West Virginia in 1911. James Tyree, son of Howard, recalls stories his father told him of how they lived here. “They attempted to do a little bit of everything,” he says. “They captured wild horses and broke them, sold them to the military. They did some work for the railroad. Back then they used to have problems with the coal-fired trains starting fires on either side of the track. They would have people that would take a big drag line, like a farming disk — I heard they were twenty or twenty-five feet wide, and they were usually pulled by a six or eight horse team — they would go out to a certain point on the railroad line and drive till the end of the day. Then at the end of the second or third day, they crossed the tracks again and came home the next day.”

Howard Tyree was the youngest of seven children. At some point, the family moved closer to the town of Conata. “I was told that Conata was a place where they had early rodeos, that were just out in the plains, in the open,” James Tyree recalls. “They didn’t have the big bleachers and gates and stuff like that. My dad was quite a horseman. He was kind of a horse whisperer. There never was a horse that he couldn’t train. In the rodeo he did the bulldogging, bronc riding, bull riding, calf roping, whatever.

“He got disqualified one year out there from calf roping. He had adapted a method of throwing his rope underhanded and he could catch three feet in one loop, yank him up. And then when the calf was in the air, he’d throw two half hitches overhand and tie the knot. So he never got off his horse. He was disqualified for that, which was rather unique.”

Eventually the family moved to Minneapolis. Howard Tyree and the other Tyree brothers enlisted in the service (Howard in the Air Force) during World War II. Later, Howard ran a small ranch in Golden Valley, Minnesota, where James was raised.

In 1954, Howard Tyree drove his family out to the old homestead and visited the grave site of his twin brother, Eugene, marked only by a pile of rocks. “He took a bottle,” James says, “and he wrote a note identifying the site and set it in the pile of rocks. Sometime later the Boy Scouts came along and they found the grave site and they contacted my dad.”

Bill Tines was part of that scout troop, based in Wasta. “The Scout leader was George ‘Junior’ Gunn. His dad had homesteaded not very far from the Tyree grave and Junior knew about the grave. And somehow our Scout leaders decided that’d be a good project for us to fix up his grave. So probably in the late fifties or so we went down and we found the grave and we put the posts up and the cross and everything.”

“My dad and [his brother] Roy went up there for that,” James Tyree recalls. “And a few years later, when I was older, they had a reunion out there from the group that took care of the grave site. My dad, Roy and I went out there, around 1960, and we rode horseback in there and spent a few days out there.”

Over the years, Scouts became troop leaders. Wasta could no longer support Troop 30. Bill Tines moved to New Underwood and led the Troop there. The tradition of stewardship over the infant’s grave continued, as did the relationship with the Tyrees.

When Howard Tyree passed away in 2007, James Tyree, accompanied by his son Danton, honored his request to scatter his ashes at the site of his twin brother’s grave. Bill Tines and several generations of Scouts joined the family at the memorial.

Last year, Sioux Falls resident Lance Smith was running the unmarked Sage Creek Wilderness Loop in the Badlands when he came across the lone grave site. He made it a personal mission to do some maintenance and set out to contact the Tyree family.

In May, Smith and some other volunteers, accompanied by Danton Tyree, Bill Tines and some former Scouts, made the trip to repair the fence — which bison use as a scratching post — around the site. Many of them returned for the reunion and memorial service, more than 60 years after Junior Gunn decided to improve upon the Coke bottle and note left by Howard Tyree.

“They always say things happen and you wonder, ‘Lord, why do you do this?'” Tines says. “I’m sure when that little baby died, they thought, ‘Lord, why do you do this?’ Well, a hundred years later, there’s people going down to take care of that grave. We’d like some of these young kids from these families that have been down there to kind of take it over and keep it going. There’s four generations in my family that have gone down there to the grave and took care of it.”

“There’s so much I don’t know, or didn’t know, about my grandfather and his growing up that this all kind of brought up,” says Danton Tyree.”So hearing stories with the Scouts has been fun, and hearing those things from my dad specifically. Sometimes you don’t start thinking about those things until they’re gone.”

“Not very many people have their name on a map, where there’s significance to the land, from your ancestors. There’s not a lot of people that can have that connection. And for me it was kind of lost. Then when Lance came around, he just completely reinvigorated the whole thing for our family. There’s a lot of grave sites out there. And for this one, for some reason, to draw the interest that it has, it has certainly benefited me and my family.”

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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The Badlands Ranch

By Bernie Hunhoff

As Badlands B&B pioneers, Phil and Amy Kruse occasionally speak at entrepreneurship conferences. They recently visited Lemmon, where they posed by a mural near John Lopez’s Kokomo Gallery.

Badlands ranching was never easy. Rain is always scarce and the soil seems better suited to prickly pear cactus than anything a sheep or cow might enjoy. Still, there’s a peaceful beauty to the landscapes — which sometimes look like the moon with some grass, a rare tree and a dirt road added — so the Kruse family has been finding ways to stay put for 101 years.

Phil Kruse was born there in 1963. He studied electrical engineering at LeTourneau University in Texas, but soon after graduating he came home to the ranch.”I knew I’d have to supplement the income,” he says, noting that the rugged land requires about 50 acres of forage for every cow.”Just in my lifetime we’ve lost about half of the farmers in our area.”

Even as a teenager, Phil recognized that there might be potential in the 1 million travelers who pass within a few miles of the Kruse ranch every summer.”I always had a dream of maybe doing a bed and breakfast,” he says.

With the help of his father and brothers, he started to build a concrete guest house in 1996.”I hooked the cement mixer to the tractor and bought 200 bags at a time from the South Dakota Cement Plant in Rapid City,” he says.

When he ran short of money, he tried to get a loan for more cement.”The banker said he couldn’t loan me anything until it was finished,” he remembers,”and I couldn’t finish it without the loan.” Fortunately his dad scraped together $20,000 and work proceeded on the eight-room lodge now known as the Circle View Ranch, just a few miles west of Interior along Highway 44.

He welcomed his first guests in 2000.”Right away, we got a lot of foreigners because they knew what a B&B was. We could see that people appreciated our authenticity.”

Bookings were slow in the early years. That began to change in 2003 when Amy Kom, an Arizona State University student from Idaho, arrived to do a summer internship at the national park. She met Phil at a branding; they were engaged by July and married by October.

Though she was new to the region, Amy shared Phil’s love of the Badlands and his vision to create a lodge for travelers. She brought a feminine touch to the business, plus some restaurant experience and her new degree in recreation management. As the years passed, she also delivered three children who have grown up making coffee, doing laundry and showing city people how to feed the chickens that are scratching in the yard.

A carrol-loving donkey called Jack is sometimes part of the welcoming committee at the Circle View, along with the Kruses’ children, Russell, Jacob and Katie.

Amy says the guests are looking for a rural experience or they wouldn’t be there, but she and Phil don’t put on a show.”We just live our lives. There might be a rattlesnake on the back deck (though that would be rare) and the baby might be crying but that’s just how we live.”

The Kruses’ children — Katie, 11, Jacob, 10, and Russell, 9 — welcome tag-alongs as they feed an orphan calf or collect eggs. The children also help to serve a full ranch breakfast to the guests, who may number 30 to 40 on a summer morning.

The complimentary breakfast is a favorite for the travelers, who have often grown weary of restaurant fare, and Amy says cooking for three dozen”isn’t such a big deal when you do it every day. We have a system.”

The breakfast routine actually begins with that Badlands soil.”We harvest our own wheat that we grow at the ranch,” Amy says.”We grind wheat every couple of weeks and I make a flour for our own whole wheat and berry pancakes.” The children pick fresh eggs from the hen house, and honey is also produced on the ranch. The rest of the menu varies from day to day, but always with enough variety to suit all palates.

After breakfast, most guests head for the park but oftentimes they are reluctant to leave the ranch. Some go on rock hunting or prairie dog hunting expeditions, while others are content feeding carrots to the donkey or petting Cowboy Kitty, a 15-year-old black cat.

“People also like to watch the fall roundup, spring branding and vaccinating — whatever we might be doing,” Phil says.”People are interested in rural America. But we don’t really entertain people. We don’t have the time.”

Phil’s brother, Daniel, and Daniel’s daughter, Casie, offer horseback tours and the Kruses have welcomed weddings, retreats, class reunions and other big gatherings.

Circle View also has an accommodation for more solitary travelers — honeymooners, perhaps, or a reclusive poet: it’s a homesteader’s cabin that is cleaner but no more civilized than it was in 1880 when built by the Hamm family.

There’s no plumbing or electricity, although there is a wood outhouse and a fire pit outside. Guests bring their own bedding, water and supplies. The cabin, which lies close to the White River, ranks as one of South Dakota’s most primitive lodging rentals. A New York Times travel writer described it as an opportunity to”live the hardscrabble life of a claimer for a night or two.” The Kruses also have two other cabins with all the usual amenities, along with the eight-room lodge.

They were already busy 10 years ago when AirBnB began to change the bed and breakfast industry. Today the website accounts for a considerable share of their bookings, and they stay busy throughout the summer, but they still find time to enjoy the Badlands.

“We like to hike the park,” says Amy.”The kids especially like Notch Trail, where there’s a really thrilling ladder that you have to climb to reach an amazing view. We also like to go fishing in the dam, motorcycling or kayaking in the White River.”

The uncertainty of weather and cattle prices have taken a toll on Badlands farmers and ranchers through the years but the Kruses”make hay” from a neighborly culture that has survived good times and bad.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Badlands Fast

By Michael Zimny

Lance Smith attempts a Fastest Known Time in the Badlands’ Sage Creek Wilderness.

You won’t find the”Sage Creek Wilderness Loop” on any map of Badlands National Park. There is no official trail or signage. Lance Smith of Sioux Falls had hiked the area numerous times with his son, and thought that others might enjoy the scenery, if they knew about it.

“So I went on my own and decided to see how fast I could do it,” Smith says.”And the FKT (Fastest Known Time) website put it up as a route.”

He put up a time to beat, and somebody did.

“I did a great time, I thought. But then a guy named John Haak went out and beat the time I put up by 56 minutes or so.”

Haak beat Smith’s time just two weeks later, in an area of the park that sees very little foot traffic, beyond a small area around the Conata Picnic Area.

“The first time I did it, I wanted to spend some time trying to get some good pictures, video, just to try to entice some other people potentially to do it,” says Smith.”Because the Badlands can be a place that a lot of people don’t think of doing this type of thing.”

Smith returned recently and reclaimed his Fastest Known Time (FKT), clocking 3 hours, 27 minutes, 8 seconds on the 22-ish mile loop. Still, his record may not last for long, and that’s fine by him.”It’s really fostering this competition like, ‘Hey, I did this. Now you go beat me.’ When that person beats you, you congratulate them. Then if you want, you can go back and try to beat that person again.”

There are currently five routes listed on the latest iteration of fastestknowntime.com: the Centennial Trail, a Black Elk Peak out-and-back, the Run Across South Dakota, the Sage Creek Wilderness Loop and the Mickelson Trail (for which no winning time is listed as yet). Other than the initial FKT for the Black Elk Peak route, set by Jeff Valliere in 2017, all listed times were logged in 2020.

FKT’s have been gaining in popularity, nationally and around the world, since the early 2000s — especially on well-known, signed trail systems like the Appalachian Trail. The FKT world witnessed a tsunami of new fastest time submissions in 2020.”It blew up so much because of COVID,” says Smith, who also holds the FKT for the Centennial Trail.”All the races that people like to participate in got canceled, postponed. People are looking to get out to kind of push themselves, experience something.”

Smith says he’s interested in pioneering more off-trail routes.”There’s some really cool landscapes that we have in South Dakota. We just don’t have very many routes submitted to the website, which I’m hoping to maybe create.”

Finding a good route is about more than just picking a place to run, says Smith.”It has to have good aesthetics, be fun, challenging. Anybody can go out and run from point A to point B. I’m kind of looking in the Black Hills for some stuff to do. There are the Slim Buttes and the North and South Cave Hills. I’ve kind of been looking at how to link those two distinct areas together with a run.

“I would hope that maybe some other people see this as an avenue of sharing some cool adventure running or hiking that they’ve done with others.”

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Off-Trail in the Badlands

By Michael Zimny

Explorers who venture past the White River Overlook are treated to varied landscapes and wildlife.

The White River Overlook is one of those panoramic pull-offs on the Badlands Loop Road. You stop and say, “that’s cool,” and it’s off to Wall Drug to buy a stuffed jackalope (make sure to check out the dining room’s awesome Western art collection).

But what if you could be down there, in that otherworldly-looking place? You can! There’s no permit required for backcountry hiking or camping in the Badlands. You don’t even have to hang glide off the Badlands Wall, though that would be pretty epic in a slightly 80’s kind of way (and might require a permit). There are passes in the Wall where you can just walk right in.

One obstacle you will not contend with is the White River itself, about 6 miles south of the White River Overlook. (The only place that the White River actually runs through Badlands National Park is in a small corner of the South Unit, near the seasonally opened White River Visitor Center).

A potential point of entry is from a gravel road that runs between Interior and the Loop Road. From here you can walk along the south side of the Wall, among freestanding sedimentary temples, as the country flattens riverward. We parked at a pull off at the southern park boundary and walked northeast across the prairie toward The Castles formation dominating the northern horizon. Early spring is auspicious for crossing this country, when the snow is melted, and tender chutes of cool-season grass are just beginning to burst through the still-matted brown meadow. Each footstep is freer, and snakes have less camo.

Drawing closer to The Castles — one of those appropriately Gothic formations with spindly spires — you can hew close to the edge of the Wall. Or you can choose a passage into the Wall. Some drainages trace a climbable path to the summit, while others narrow until impassable or dead end at a steep cliff face. Gully walking through claustrophobic canyons can get muddy, though; most hikers may prefer to thread the periphery of the Wall and its outer islands.

There are little worlds in the labyrinth. A chorus frog croons from inside its tiny pond among straw and cracked alkali. How did it find this isolated place and how can it ever get out? Imagine hopping around on hot rocks in skin like a sausage casing, dodging owls and rattlers, searching for a brackish, lonely puddle.

Another approach to the White River Underlook is from Big Foot Pass. Park by that overlook and walk the road to the bottom, and you can skip the prairie prologue and slip between rainbow mounds right onto the fractal crust. At twilight, the white alkali flats glow like the sidewalk tiles beneath Michael Jackson’s feet in the video for “Billie Jean.”

We threaded a path through the grottoes at Big Foot Pass and spotted a porcupine browsing beneath a purple sky, a short-eared owl wrapping up the evening hunt, and a deer sentry gracefully keeping watch from a hogback butte. This is the recommended route. From here, you can hike southeast along the edge of the Wall and into the open. The Wall stretches southward in a pincerlike movement from the White River Overlook, a horseshoe-bay you can trace as you circle back, contemplating the unique Badlands geometry etched by sun and wind.

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Exploring Deer Haven

By Michael Zimny

Deer Haven is a solitary plateau near Conata Basin in the Badlands.

In South Dakota you can social distance outside. There’s no Times Square out there. And the distances are greater.

Inside may be safer but it can become a prison, a dungeon with a tiny window installed by Apple or Samsung. That window is where you find us, and we are rowdy house guests.

And South Dakota is home to the badlands. The Badlands. There is no place as unconfined.

The Conata Basin is a grassy bay between the main Badlands wall and an intersecting ridgeline that branches south and east. By night, black-footed ferrets, back from near-extinction, hunt prairie dogs. So do rattlesnakes, owls, fox and coyote. At the Conata Picnic Area, you can park and hike around in the basin or up into the high country.

From here, there are drainages that track northeasterly into a narrow canyon where you can climb to the very edge of the wall and peep at the Badlands loop road snaking through the Yellow Mounds below. Climb down to explore an off-road world, seldom-seen, car-free.

At the end of the little cul-de-sac in the Conata Picnic Area, there’s a sign with a blurb about a place called Deer Haven, a juniper forest plateau along the ridgeline above Conata Basin.

There is no marked trail. The easiest way to get there is to walk southeast, then east along the edge of the ridgeline. You’ll find a well-worn game/human path that peters out at a cut in a dome formation. As soon as you round this dome and face north, Deer Haven is spread out before you.

There are many deer trails through a patch of thick brush, and at least one doable pass up onto the plateau. As a public service announcement, I should mention that as with much off-trail — and some on-trail — Badlands exploration, making this ascent involves some hands-and-feet scrambling. Please proceed with caution and know that you can also access beautiful views from the low country.

As you walk towards Deer Haven, you’ll notice a distinctive hole that could be a portal to another dimension high along the ridgeline to the west.

Archaeologist Linea Sundstrom has written about what she calls a “cross-cultural transference of the sacred geography” in regards to the Black Hills, meaning that beliefs in the sacral nature of particular places were transferred among different groups of people over time. I’m not an archaeologist but I do believe that’s a fine way of thinking — not that you have to appropriate other peoples’ cultures, but that I can accept that a place you say is sacred is sacred, and then perceive it as such, in a consecrated manner. We can extend this even to deer, who clearly sacralized this place before somebody at the National Park Service thought of putting up a sign in the cul-de-sac. If you go, you’ll understand.

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Oh Deer

Photographer Christian Begeman avoided the big deals Thanksgiving weekend and went for big game instead. His travels took him to Walworth County, Custer State Park and the Badlands, where he found deer and other wildlife engaged in romantic pursuits.”I came across a mule buck that had added a crown of thistle to his rack. It must’ve worked, as I watched him court a doe and take care of business,” Begeman says.”The bighorn sheep were active and I heard the crack of horns echo through the valleys more than once. I did not witness any of those hostilities, but the big rams were on the move.”

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Bookin’ It Through the Badlands

Photographer Scott Korsten and his wife Marilyn recently discovered that it pays to take it easy when traveling across South Dakota. “My wife and I were on a quick business-related trip to the Black Hills area,” Korsten says. “Although we were driving with purpose, trying to make good time, we decided to take the quick detour through the Badlands…a place we hadn’t actually driven through for several years. We were reminded of just how vast and beautiful this area of the state’s interior really is — well worth the extra time it took for our trip.”

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West River Odyssey

By Christian Begeman

My immediate family gathered this month in Mobridge. It was the first time we’d all been together in several years. From a family of six on the farm to a family of more than 20 scattered from Sioux Falls to California seems pretty amazing, but probably not that uncommon. I grew up roughly 60 miles west and 10 miles south of Mobridge near the Moreau River breaks. I don’t get back in that country near enough, but this was a good year to go. The rain has been abundant and the wildflowers profuse. Last season was dry, and it seems all that stunted life from a year ago has burst into its fullest measure this time around.

Before heading home, I took a notable detour to the beautiful Matthews Opera House in Spearfish to take in my friend Eliza Blue’s new album release concert. From there I wandered down through Custer State Park, where I reveled in a summer thunderstorm (until a few large hailstones caused me to flee south into Wind Cave National Park). Then I spent a day and a half in the Badlands, where I had good luck watching burrowing owls take care of their young. After that, I made my way north to the rolling hills of Perkins and Corson counties.

The real surprise of the journey was an impromptu photo tour just northwest of Bison. Sion Hanson is a friend of a friend who asked if I’d be willing to take some photos of him and some of the landmarks on his land for his grandkids. Hanson turned 60 this year and wants to pass along a little bit of the family history and legacy in images as well as stories. I didn’t quite know what to expect as we pulled out of the yard and headed north along a wheat field through the tall grass. Then we crested the hill.

As I mentioned, I grew up near the rugged and rolling hills of the Moreau River breaks along the Dewey and Ziebach county line, so I have a near-and-dear appreciation for the long draws and short grass hills topped with gravel, yucca and Black Samson flowers (also known as wild purple coneflower). What now opened before us was the south edge of the Grand River breaks, and it was breathtaking. The short grass prairie had taller than normal grass waving in the wind, and it was ablaze with wildflowers, particularly Black Samson. One of the long draws before us was where Hanson’s grandfather and grandmother had a sod house built back when the land opened for settlement in the early 1900s. Hanson’s granddad was a freight wagon driver who hauled goods to Bison from the nearest train depot to the north. Each trip was a two-day journey. We saw parts of the old road from Bison to Hettinger that survived as a fire trail, at least into the 1970s. It is mostly overgrown now.

It was an unexpected and enjoyable trip to some of our state’s truly wide-open and rugged country. To hear the history of it as well as help a new friend keep the stories and places alive for his family was quite an honor. Those couple hours of looking over the land, reminiscing and simply enjoying the view was a good reminder of how strong the family unit was and still is in these open prairies of our great state. It was only fitting that my next few days of vacation were spent making new memories with my own family at the end of this summer’s West River odyssey.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Badlands South: Corner-to-Corner

By Michael Zimny

The temple ruins in the Garden of the Gods.

The Badlands has this other unit (actually two) that you might not know about.

The South Unit is not exactly a secret. People from around the world do veer off the famous Badlands Loop road to explore its outer edges. But only a tiny fraction of the total visitors to Badlands National Park visit the South Unit at all, let alone explore its inner reaches on foot.

The South Unit and its even more unknown and inaccessible cousin — the Palmer Unit — have no paved roads and no hiking trails. Eventually that may change. Badlands National Park and the Oglala Sioux Tribe jointly manage the unit. For years, there have been talks about potentially developing Badlands South as the first tribal national park. For now, other than a few ranchers and their cattle (yes, on a national park, it’s complicated) the unit remains very lightly traveled.

Despite the lack of dedicated hiking trails though, you can explore the hidden grandeur of the South Unit on foot. But, for those who are interested in doing so, there’s very little information out there. So we hiked corner to corner across the South Unit to demonstrate that it can be done.

The route we took is just one of many possibilities. There’s only one place to park a vehicle though (other than on the shoulder of a country road, which may not be safe or even legal) — the White River Visitor Center at the southeast corner of the unit. We parked there and caught a ride to the northwest corner of the unit, near the Red Shirt community.

Coffin Butte.

We brought the basic camping supplies: 4 liters of water, a map and an iPhone 6S with the Gaia GPS app. With an annual membership you get access to National Geographic Trails Illustrated maps of public lands. And since you don’t need cell service for geotracking to work, you can keep your phone on airplane mode, use it as a GPS and use very little battery. We packed a mobile charger but didn’t really need it.

South Unit Ranger Richard Sherman had previously guided us to a freshwater spring about 14 or 15 miles, by foot, from the start. We marked the coordinates on Gaia and made it, roughly, our halfway point so we wouldn’t have to carry as much water.

Before the northbound BIA 42 crosses the Cheyenne River, there’s a dirt road on the right. This is where we started. The Trails Illustrated map showed another right ahead on a south/southeast bound two-track ranch road. Here’s the thing about the “no trails” deal in the South Unit. The “roads” inside the park are basically trails. In fact, they’re no different than some of the ATV-maintained hiking trails at Wind Cave National Park and other prairie parks, except that there are no blazes, and there are lots of forks, and occasionally a two track becomes a single cattle trail or no trail at all. When we wanted to stay on “the road” for a while, but weren’t sure which fork to take, Gaia (which isn’t paying us) never failed.

About a quarter mile in, this second road climbed atop a hill yielding spectacular 360-degree views of the Badlands and a lucky group of free-range mustangs. This road parallels a bend in the Cheyenne before descending south/southeast into Battle Creek Canyon. You can follow this narrow, scenic canyon nestled between pink and white cliffs for about a dozen miles before you run into the edge of Cuny Table.

Along the trail, the yellow blossoms of rubber rabbitbrush were swarmed with throngs of butterflies. The breeze schlepped in aroma of sage and prairie dog song filled the air. (And less exotic sounds.)

Butterflies swarm on rubber rabbitbrush.

South Unit administration is a tangle of tribal and NPS interests, complicated by the Korean war-era seizure of Lakota ranching lands for a former bombing range (locals say there’s still unexploded ordinance out there). As a result, bringing the South Unit under the auspices of Badlands National Park required granting grazing rights to ranchers. So out here, you share the trail with cattle, and occasionally cross a fence or two. As we walked through the canyon, a skittish herd not very accustomed to strangers stayed always a little ahead of us. If you’re keen on avoiding a bovine escort, you might stay out of Battle Creek Canyon, because there’s nowhere for them to go but just up ahead, and then just up ahead again.

Cows or no, the canyon does offer a chance to appreciate the geologic wonders of the Badlands up close and in relative solitude. There are gangly chimney spires, faceless sand-mannequins with prickly pear toupees and fluffy pink dunes. Battle Creek itself carves out canyons-within-the-canyon where tight coils of canyon wall form hidden rock closets that reemerge into the open around a bend. The wind braids itself through old bones in cottonwood groves. No engines hum. Out here, it’s just you and the Badlands (and the cows). No paved roads, no people.

Eventually the road/trail runs out in a scrubby flume at the edge of Cuny Table. The spring we had marked is one of several here that burrows under and over ground down the steep ravine, and then emerges to feed a system of small streams. We figured any stream would lead to a relatively easy route to the tabletop, but that didn’t happen. And here’s as good a place as any to insert an obligatory word of caution. Hiking off-trail across the South Unit is not without its hazards, and making your own way up and down plateaus like Cuny Table is one of them. If you’re trailblazing to the top, be aware that hand and footholds are sometimes less solid then they look. Hold onto a cedar or some rabbitbrush branches if you can.

At the top, a light rain was falling and we quickly found the spring, aided by GPS of course. This particular spring has been capped and fills a cattle trough, the overflow spilling into subterranean streams. The taste is cool, mineral-rich and refreshing. A microbrew made from Cuny Table spring water — in bottles with a nice bison-on-the-Badlands label — would probably fly out of the coolers at bars in Wall and Interior.

Fog Creek marsh.

We’d walked about 15 miles of rocky terrain and the sun was sinking. A herd hugged Cuny’s northern rim and we didn’t want to fall asleep to cow song, so we trekked west across a two-track through a sunflower field, across a small peninsula of non-park land, in search of a spot to set up camp. Crossing back onto park land, we found a good flat spot to pitch a tent. After a long day in the canyon, the view on the plateau can feel like a let down. Then sun meets horizon and golden hour scatters pixie dust over the prairie as the animals come out to forage and hunt. The silky hairs of velvet mullein shimmer and stand on end like tiny antennae soaking up sun butter. At dusk you can sit and emulate those amber waves. This is a wealthy place. And that Cuny Table spring water tastes like champagne when you’re thirsty.

After sunset, a radio tower blinked. We imagined conspiracy theories and relationship advice traveling through space in indecipherable frequencies. Our cheap tent from Cabela’s flapped incessantly in the breeze.

In the pre-dawn light, a coyote ambled toward the rising sun and a system of beautiful, rolling sand hills that billow up from atop the plateau. On the east side of the sand hills, we looked for a pass from Cuny Table to the floor at the foot of Coffin Butte.

Richard Sherman had warned about getting bogged down in the bottomlands around Fog Creek, but looking for a way down, it seemed like the ticket. The creek pass became a thick, almost impassable cedar thicket, that seemed to wind forever through brush that we sometimes had to crawl through, but gradually it wound its way down off Cuny Table.

Here was the route’s grand culmination, emerging onto a coliseum floor in the shadow of Coffin Butte, surrounded by monuments as odd in their own natural way as the giant prairie dog at the Ranch Store or Wayne Porter’s bullhead off I-90. A pyramid formation juts sunward and stops short its ascent, topped with an emerald green stage as planate as an office desk.

The view from atop Cuny Table.

This is where the whole operation begins to make perfect sense. Sure, you’ve blazed 30 miles of trail across a rocky, boot-busting, unsigned wilderness, alongside a skittish herd of beeves no less. But now you’re here. Each monolith or pinnacle or hoodoo in this enchanted garden is a totem to geologic eras that stretch back for eons. This is church. The journey here should be challenging. To show up clean and rested as if stepping off an airport conveyor would miss the point. A ragged nerve, a sleepless mind, is a point of union with the rock, a correspondence with the two and four-legged travelers that came before you. Maybe this is a place where signs could only ever misdirect.

Fog Creek crochets its way through this Garden of the. Wide stretches of reeds and cattails line its banks, a marshland winding through a rocky desert. One thing you learn exploring the South Unit is that the Badlands contain ecosystems — swampy wetlands, thick riparian forests — beyond the ones you see in your Facebook feed. Avoiding the Fog Creek marsh as it snakes through the Garden is nearly impossible without cutting straight north, adding another dozen or so miles to the journey.

After passing Coffin Butte, the next and final landmark on the way back to the White River Visitor Center is Cedar Butte, a mesa aptly named for the cedar canopy you can spot from miles away, and a favorite hangout for bighorn sheep. In the final stretch, beneath Cedar Butte, our journey paralleled BIA 2 so closely that eventually we just walked down the road. A single car passed.

At a curve in the road we cut southeast through the park again, and found an easy White River crossing, then crossed a final stretch of prairie before reaching the visitor center, where we found Richard Sherman. He said we were crazy, but also that he was interested in a longer, crazier route. The South Unit holds as many possibilities as there are hikers with an itch to explore. We can say we’ve walked from one corner of the South Unit to the other, but we haven’t surveyed the scene from the top of Stronghold Table, or Galigo or Plenty Star, or traversed the Cactus Flats or navigated Cottonwood Pass. Our route covered about 30 miles in two days, and that was enough, for now. But there’s something out there in that unsigned, other Badlands that will bring us back.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A New Day in the Badlands

By Christian Begeman

There are few early morning scenarios that excite me. I’m not one to pop right out of bed and feel great. I need time to wake up, get the grogginess out and get the brain functioning at the proper levels. Spending the first hours of the day in Badlands National Park, however, has a way of getting me up and going every time. I haven’t done it a lot, but the rugged beauty, abundant wildlife and overall peace and calm of the new day dawning over the Badlands has never disappointed.

On August 25, the National Park Service commemorated its 101st birthday. They asked fans to submit haiku poetry to help celebrate on social media. I had just spent an incredible morning in the Badlands, where I photographed my first ever bobcat in the wild and witnessed a unique, hazy sunrise caused by humidity and wildfires in neighboring states. All I remembered about haiku was that the first line has five syllables, the second line has seven and the third line goes back to five. I’m sure there are more rules, but I didn’t take the time to look them up. I chose two photos from my late August morning and wrote the following:

We gazed at the sun.

The ground was broken and bent.

Song sprang from shadows.

— Inspired by the sun rising over Panoramic Point

Ears above tall grass,

Eyes along the rugged ridge.

Hunger gnaws within.

— Inspired by the bobcat

Now whether those are good haiku or not is up for debate. For me, the fun came in reflecting on the morning and the images I captured in this new way. With that in mind, I resolved to go back to the Badlands this month, capture what I saw and then present it to you in this column.

Again, the Badlands did not disappoint. The first thing I noticed, just as the sky began to brighten, was what appeared to be a vast white lake in the valley below the formations. A low fog had settled, rendering the views almost primordial. Soon the sun rose, illuminating and coloring the clouds over Norbeck Pass. A little later, I passed a small group of bighorn rams along the park road. I drove ahead to where I thought I wouldn’t stress them as I took photos. They ended up walking right by me. One of them serendipitously passed on the driver’s side where I was huddled down, and I snapped as many photos as I could. One starburst photo out of a dozen exposures was my favorite shot of the morning. I couldn’t have planned it or executed it again if I tried. During moments and mornings like this, I can’t help but think of a line in a favorite hymn:”All things are mine, because I am His. How can I keep from singing?” (or photographing in my case).

I guess dawn in Badlands National Park has a way of bringing out the awe and wonder in a person. Whether it is a haiku, a perfect photo or an old hymn of praise, the rugged beauty of one of our state’s finest gems continues to inspire … especially in the light of a new day.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.