Badlands National Park Trip Planner

Day 1 Badlands Loop Road & North Unit overlooks + Cedar Pass & Ben Reifel Visitor Center + Sage Creek Wilderness & Rim Road

1. Drive the Badlands Loop Road (SD 240)

   Badlands Loop Road & North Unit overlooks · 3 hr · easy pace

   The paved two-lane road through the North Unit, with more than a dozen marked overlooks and trailheads between the Wall and Cactus Flat entrances. NPS lists a one to two hour drive without stops; with a family it is closer to a half day. Wildlife crosses the road, so pull into an overlook instead of stopping in a lane.

2. 

   Big Badlands Overlook

   Badlands Loop Road & North Unit overlooks · 30 min · easy pace

   The first overlook inside the northeast entrance at I-90 Exit 131, where the Badlands Wall drops from the flat prairie tableland to the eroded basin. The pullout is paved and the whole view reads from the rail. It faces east, so it catches first light if you sleep at Cedar Pass.

3. 

   Pinnacles Overlook

   Badlands Loop Road & North Unit overlooks · 30 min · easy pace

   A sunset and sunrise pullout near the north entrance at I-90 Exit 110, looking south over a wall of spires and the Sage Creek basin. Bighorn sheep are often on the rock below the railing, per NPS wildlife notes. The better evening light comes driving east from here, with the sun behind you.

4. 

   Yellow Mounds Overlook

   Badlands Loop Road & North Unit overlooks · 20 min · easy pace

   A Loop Road pullout where banded yellow and red paleosols, ancient fossil soils, show below the gray Chadron Formation. Per NPS, the yellow is a fossil soil that weathered before the younger formations buried it. It is a roadside stop with no walking required, and one of the few places on the drive where the color is not white and tan.

5. 

   Fossil Exhibit Trail and Fossil Preparation Lab

   Cedar Pass & Ben Reifel Visitor Center · 45 min · easy · 0.25 mi

   A 0.25-mile accessible boardwalk loop with fossil replicas and exhibits of the mammals that lived here 37 to 28 million years ago, including the entelodont Archaeotherium and the land tortoise Stylemys. The Fossil Preparation Lab at Ben Reifel Visitor Center runs June through September, and NPS posts the current specimens, including a near-complete Hoplophoneus skull and a peccary skull found on a park hike. Collecting rocks or fossils anywhere in the park is illegal.

6. 

   Door and Window trails

   Cedar Pass & Ben Reifel Visitor Center · 1 hr · easy · 1 mi

   Two short trails off the same Cedar Pass lot, where you walk through the Badlands Wall instead of looking at it. Door Trail is 0.75 miles round trip, a quarter-mile accessible boardwalk to a gap in the wall, then loose numbered posts beyond; Window Trail is a 0.25-mile boardwalk to a natural window framing an eroded canyon. Both are rated easy, and the Window Trail is stroller friendly.

7. 

   Roberts Prairie Dog Town

   Sage Creek Wilderness & Rim Road · 20 min · easy pace

   A marked pull-off on Sage Creek Rim Road at the largest prairie-dog town in the accessible parts of the park, where the colonies whistle and stand at their burrow entrances. NPS warns the colonies can carry plague, so watch from a distance and do not feed or approach the animals. Burns Basin Overlook and the Sage Creek Campground are two more places NPS lists for the same animals.

8. 

   Cedar Pass Campground

   Cedar Pass & Ben Reifel Visitor Center · 1 hr · easy pace

   The developed campground below the Badlands Wall, next to the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, with potable water and flush toilets in season. Sites are reservable through the concessioner and face the wall, so sunrise lands on the buttes from the tent. For free primitive camping in the bison range instead, Sage Creek Campground sits at the end of the gravel rim road with pit toilets and no water.

Day 2 Stronghold Unit (South Unit, Pine Ridge)

≈1h drive from Cedar Pass & Ben Reifel Visitor Center

1. Drive around the Stronghold Unit (South Unit)

   Stronghold Unit (South Unit, Pine Ridge) · 2.5 hr · easy pace

   The South Unit lies entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and is co-managed by the park and the Oglala Lakota Tribe. There are no paved roads through it, so the way to see it is the drive around its edge on SD 27 and BIA 2, past the White River Visitor Center and Red Shirt Table Overlook; NPS says the Scenic to Red Shirt stretch takes about an hour one way. Stronghold Table, the site of the last known Ghost Dance, is inside the unit and reachable only on foot, and backcountry camping is not permitted.