Answer the questions. Each one tells you why. Big and Little wrote them.
Park Quiz
Question 1 of 5
Badlands lets you walk off the trail, which most national parks do not. What does the park call that?
NPS says Badlands National Park has an Open Hike Policy, meaning that you are allowed to hike off-trail. The park attaches two warnings to it. Badlands formations are often easier to climb up than to climb down, and cell service is not readily available in the backcountry. Stay at least 100 feet from any animal, and if the animal reacts to you at all, you are too close.
Lakota people have called this place mako sica for hundreds of years. What does it mean?
Mako sica translates literally as bad lands. French fur trappers who spent time with the Lakota called the same country les mauvaises terres a traverser, bad lands to travel across, so the French name probably came straight from the Lakota one. Bad here means hard to cross: wet clay turns slick and sticky, the canyons and buttes are hard to navigate, and the few water sources are usually muddy and unsafe to drink. In 1922 someone proposed calling it Wonderland National Park instead.
How fast is the Badlands wearing away?
NPS estimates the Badlands erode at about one inch per year, which is fast for rock. The granite of the Black Hills, just to the west, erodes one inch per 10,000 years. The rivers started cutting here roughly 500,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that in the next 500,000 years the Badlands will have eroded away completely.
The Fossil Exhibit Trail boardwalk is lined with fossil casts you are allowed to touch. What animals are they?
NPS says the majority of fossils found in the park are fossil mammals that roamed this area from 37 to 28 million years ago. Oreodonts, plant eaters about the size of a sheep, are the most common. Park preparators have also worked on a 30-million-year-old tortoise, Stylemys, and on a nearly complete skull of Hoplophoneus primaevus, a cat-like animal with saber teeth. None of them are dinosaurs. The rock here is far too young.
You are camping two nights at Sage Creek Campground. What do you have to haul in?
NPS lists pit toilets and covered picnic tables at Sage Creek Campground, but not water. Potable water is available at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, which is roughly an hour away by road at the other end of the park. Fill everything there before you drive west.