We lost them for thirty minutes off Fossil Exhibit Trail
A killdeer called past the last loop of Cedar Pass Campground all three nights we were there and not one of us ever laid eyes on it. Erika would stop whatever she was doing in the galley and turn her head toward it. Little went out after dinner with a flashlight to find the bird and came back twenty minutes later with a rock.
We came in from Rapid City on the fifteenth, picked up junior ranger packets at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center at Cedar Pass, and drove the loop road that afternoon with the windows down. The building carries the name of Ben Reifel, Sicangu Lakota, born on the Rosebud Reservation, the first Lakota elected to Congress. The park’s South Unit lies inside the Pine Ridge Reservation, on land the Oglala Sioux Tribe granted under a 1976 easement and the Park Service holds in trust for the tribe. We stayed north of there the whole visit, which seems worth saying out loud rather than leaving to the map.
Prairie dogs first, and then prairie dogs for three days, whole towns of them along the loop, one animal up at each burrow mouth doing the work of a smoke alarm. A bighorn ram stood over the road near the Pinnacles and did not move for us. A wild turkey walked the gravel shoulder like it had somewhere to be. No bison: the park keeps a herd out in the Sage Creek end of the wilderness and we never saw one.
We drove up to Wall on the sixteenth. Ted and Dorothy Hustead put out signs offering free ice water in 1936 to get people off the highway, and the highway has been getting off ever since. Root beer floats, rubber jackalopes, a mechanical band. Little found the thing nobody had pointed out: every parking spot on the main street has a post for tying a horse. She checked several and reported that they were real posts, not decoration.
Back in the park we walked the Door and Window trails, short boardwalks out to a gap in the Badlands Wall. Notch Trail was closed while we were there, the high-tension safety wire on its log ladder broken and waiting on repair. Big went down far enough to see the ladder from below, came back, and described the break in more detail than anyone had asked for.
Off Fossil Exhibit Trail
On the seventeenth we walked the Fossil Exhibit Trail, a quarter-mile boardwalk with cast replicas of what the ground has given up, and then we did what the park explicitly allows and most parks do not: we left the boardwalk and walked out into the formations behind it. The ground there comes up in ledges and steps, the kind that reads to a kid as a staircase somebody forgot to put a building on top of. Big and Little went ahead of us. We let them, because we could see them, and then the trail bent and the rock stood up between us and there was a stretch of maybe two minutes where nobody said anything about it.
Erika noticed first. We called. Nothing came back. We split up, which is the part I have gone over since: I went up and right along the high side, and Erika went back down toward the lot in case they had doubled. I climbed to where I could see three drainages at once and there was nobody in any of them. I called again. The wind was moving and the formations do something unhelpful to sound out there, which I did not know at the time and only worked out afterward.
Thirty minutes. I know it was about thirty because I checked my phone at the top of the second rise and checked it again when I heard them.
In the end it was many hoots that did it. Not words. Erika started it, a low two-note call that carries better than a name does, and I picked it up from the far side, and after a while one came back thin from somewhere north of both of us. Three nights of turning my head toward a bird I never laid eyes on, and then this. We hooted our way toward each other across about a quarter mile of drainage. They were up on the formations. Big had gone up a ledge system and Little had followed him and neither of them had any idea that anything had happened. They were sitting in a notch with their legs over the edge, working out which way the next ledge went. Little’s hands were white to the wrist with clay. Erika got to them before I did.
I came up the last ledge after her. Nobody said much. Erika had a hand flat on Little’s back and left it there. I sat down on the rock because my legs wanted me to, and Big told me the ledge system ran all the way around to the north, which was true and was not the thing I wanted to talk about right then. Little put a clay handprint on my sleeve. After a minute Erika said we should eat, and we went down.
The splitting up is what I have gone over since. I keep landing in the same place: one of us should have stayed at the boardwalk, so there was a fixed thing to come back to.
We did Saddle Pass after lunch, which is a short trail and almost entirely up. The clay is slick in places even dry and you use your hands on the last third. Little went up it twice. From the top the grass table sits on one side and the whole broken edge of the Wall drops away on the other. Same ground twice: flat where the water has not finished with it, cut into ledges where it has.
That is what Erika kept turning over on the drive back. She had been looking at the color bands all week, the reds and the yellows stacked and running for miles, and what caught her was that the whole thing is temporary at a rate you can almost feel. The Badlands erode about one inch a year, which is fast enough that the Park Service expects the entire formation to wear away within another 500,000 years. Every rain carries a little more of it off. The fossils come out of the walls because the walls are leaving.
We broke camp the next morning and turned west on I-90 with the billboards behind us instead of ahead of us for once. Little fell asleep with the clay still under her fingernails and the rock in her lap. Big watched for the first sign for Rushmore and called it out before I saw it.
Where this happened: Badlands National Park