Photo by Jose Torres ( Parts of it have a “small town” feel. Two prairie dogs watch Badlands National Park. The Badlands are an especially great road trip stop because of their proximity to other cool and unique places Mount Rushmore, Wind Cave National Park, Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge, Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and Jewel Cave National Monument are all within two hours’ drive. If you plan on staying the night here, you can set up a tent right next to your car in one of the park’s front country campgrounds, or – if camping isn’t your thing – you can stay at Cedar Pass Lodge in the spring, summer or fall. Far from any major airport and treasured for its scenic byway, Badlands National Park is a perfect stop or destination for your next road trip. Photo by Donna Schneider ( You might as well make a road trip out of it. Between the second week of June and the third week of September, you can visit the Fossil Preparation Lab in the Ben Reifel Visitor Center to watch paleontologists work and learn more about the ancient life they get to handle every day. Instead, report it to a ranger so that it can be studied in place and possibly taken to the park’s Fossil Preparation Lab for research and testing. If you come across a fossil while exploring the Badlands, please do not move it. Most of these fossils are about 30 - 40 million years younger than the last dinosaurs to roam the earth. Fossils in the Badlands date back to the late Eocene and Oligocene epochs, when three-toed horses, camels, creodonts and other intriguing mammals roamed the world - so don’t expect to find any dinosaurs here. Saber tooth cats aren’t the only creatures hidden among the layers upon layers of sediment in the Badlands, though - fossils of all kinds of animals and plants including rhinoceroses and marine reptiles can be found in the park. Much to her surprise, this visitor’s discovery turned out to be an incredibly rare, well-preserved skull of a saber tooth cat. In 2010, a young park visitor came across a fossil at Badlands National Park and reported it to rangers. Saber Tooth Fossil at Badlands National Park. Geologists estimate that after another 500,000 years, the Badlands will have eroded away completely - so don’t wait a half million years to visit. Though this process began roughly 500,000 years ago, it is still going on now, eroding the Badlands at the rate of about one inch per year. After all of these layers were deposited, waters flowing from the Black Hills began to wear into this sediment, carving valleys and other shapes into the landscape to create the Badlands as we know them today. Over tens of millions of years, layers of sedimentary rock were deposited in this region as the environment changed drastically from sea, to subtropical forest, to open savanna. The rugged rock formations that many people think of when they hear “Badlands” were not always here. Photo by Andreas Eckert ( Its geologic formations are millions of years old. We hope these cool facts about the Badlands inspire you to start planning your own adventure. Today, the Badlands are a great place for hiking, fossil hunting, taking a scenic drive and spotting wildlife. Considering all that this park has to offer, you might be wondering - what’s so bad about the Badlands? The Lakota people dubbed this region “mako sica,” or “bad lands,” long ago because its rocky terrain, lack of water and extreme temperatures made it difficult to traverse. Near the Black Hills of South Dakota, Badlands National Park grants visitors access to 244,000 acres of scenic landscapes, incredible geological formations, diverse wildlife and much more.
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