Near Badlands National Park is a grasslands area with very similar landscape to the badlands. Erin and I camped there a couple nights during last summer. It’s a gorgeous area or surreal buttes, blue skies and ephemeral pools left in mostly dry stream channels populated by frogs. The skies were a beautiful blue most of the time we were there but we were also hit with raging winds and pelting rain at night. The wind was so intense I was worried that my tent would get ruined, the poles bending in the wind as happened to a previous tent of mine in Canyonlands National Park one windy night. We wandered the buttes and the grasslands without any particular destination. We followed a dirt road to a cattle pond that was a haven for birds. We walked along stream beds and saw bits of fossil eroding from hillsides. Mostly we sat in the grasslands at the top of the cliffs looking out over the Badland buttes, relaxed, talked and sipped beer. It was a great weekend away from “it all”. At the end of our trip, we discovered the Jeep’s battery was dead but fortunately we flagged someone down to give us a jump start and made it home with barely a delay.
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