in the POD - The Badlands and bad lands

Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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Badlands National Park is 250,000 acres of opposites. 

Eroded buttes, wind shaped spires, and the largest undisturbed grass prairie in the US. 

It is both serene and yet wild. It is threatening but still calming. It is magical. It is oh so real.

The scale is so vast it is difficult to take in and to explain. 

You need to experience the wind, the colors - and the lack of colors - and the constant changes to the landscape as the sun and clouds create new highs and lows. Each change pointing to a new vista.

Neither of us expected such beauty out of such rawness. 

But there we were.

Speechless.

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1874 map of Custer's Black Hills expedition

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In 1874, Lt Col George Armstrong Custer led a team of over 1,000 men and 110 wagons into the Black Hills for a "fact finding" mission. The team included map-makers, engineers, and scientists who recorded the topography and natural resources of the area. The maps they created are stunning - both in their simplicity of design and in the information they recorded. "bad land" and "grove of trees" along with "rich resources" all detailed, in minutia, the layout of the land and set in motion the dismantling of the 1869 Treaty of Fort Laramie made by the US government with the Lakota tribes. Gold - and lots of it - was found. 

Settlers and prospectors poured in.

Wounded Knee - 1890.

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation now occupies much of the southern most part of South Dakota and most of the "bad land".

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Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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You could sit and look at the same spot in the Badlands for hours at a time and it would continually change right before your eyes - the way the sunlight hits, a cloud moves........ 

like the sea it is constantly shifting.

Tim says that he is full. 

Eyes. Heart.

Time to head home.

the POD

Badlands National Park

South Dakota

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