It's all Good in the Badlands

The Badlands National Park was just one of those places I never expected to get to visit, but you just never know where life takes you. Before rolling into the park, one must stop at The Ranch Store to see the colony of prairie dogs there as they are adorable!! And, of course, the giant prairie dog statue.

Open

Open

Just down the road is the entrance.

It is a quarter-million acre park, so you could spend days here, but we only budgeted hours. When you come into the park from the NE entrance you are blow away immediately at the Big Badlands Overlook.

We then drove a bit further to walk down the very short Door Trail and as the prior pictures were foreshadowing, we did get caught in some rain.

There are a bunch of hiking trails for those that are so inclined and have the time. For us, we were just doing a drive thru experience of the most well known part of the park. Here are some more photos from our drive and the multitude of overlooks you can park at along the way.

We were disturbed by the shocking lack of lots of wildlife and really pondered on the plundering we as Americans did when expanding west. Fortunately, we did see a few big horn sheep.

And, of course, some more prairie dogs (can you see the one whose head is barely showing?).

We saw some other critters, too.

Mostly we just saw more “bad lands” and these pictures truly do NOT do this place justice.

As fate would have it, we saw a final prairie dog as were leaving this beautiful national park.