Special regulations: No hunting allowed. Camping permitted at points where facilities are provided. Fires allowed only at points designated.
Warnings: Avoid low places during heavy rainstorms. Horse trails should not be attempted after rains until trail makers have had an opportunity to repair. Use only native horses. Rattlesnakes are encountered only infrequently (see General Information).
Summary of attractions: Badlands views, petrified forests, horseback riding, camping.
Theodore Roosevelt's biographer, Herman Hagedorn, writes:
"Between the prairie lands of North Dakota and the prairie lands of Montana there is a narrow strip of broken country so wild and fantastic in its beauty that it seems as though some unholy demon had carved it to mock the loveliness of God. On both sides of a sinuous river rise ten thousand buttes cut into bizarre shapes by the waters of countless centuries. The hand of man never dared to paint anything as those hills are painted. Olive and lavender, buff, brown, and dazzling white mingle with emerald and flaming scarlet to make a piece of savage splendor that is not without an element of the terrible. The buttes are stark and bare. Only in the clefts are ancient cedars, starved and deformed. In spring there are patches of green grass, an acre here, a hundred acres there, reaching up the slopes from the level bottom-land; but there are regions where for miles and miles no green thing grows, and all creation seems a witch's caldron of gray bubbles tongued with flame, held by some bit of black art forever in suspension."
Here in this broken country, known as the Badlands of the Little Missouri, the Roosevelt Regional State Parks are being developed to preserve parts of the strange area as scenic and recreational centers, and at the same time to establish a memorial to the former President, who as a young man spent part of each year from 1883 to 1886 ranching here. (See Tours 8 and 10.) To view the freakish, tumbled, unearthly valley is to appreciate and at the same time be amused by Gen. Alfred Sully's oft-quoted characterization of the region as "hell with the fires out." It must be remembered that the general received his impressions as he jolted along in a wagon, sick, while his troops fought Sioux through the confused, uncertain terrain all one hot day in August 1864. Others visiting it under more favorable circumstances, especially during the freshness of spring, concede the unparalleled fantasy of the landscape, and agree on its strange, wild, potent beauty. Twenty years after Sully fought the Sioux here Roosevelt wrote, "I grow very fond of this place ... it ... has a desolate, grim beauty, that has a curious fascination for me." Since then many noted travelers and writers have marveled at its beauties and deplored the fact that its attractions have not been made more widely known.
The traveler approaching the Badlands from the rolling prairies on either side suddenly finds himself overlooking a valley cut abruptly into the heart of the plain, a valley filled with a strange welter of bare ridges and hillocks, buttes and domes, pyramids and cones, forming one of the most extraordinary topographies on the surface of the earth. In broad horizontal stripes across the varied shapes of the buttes are the browns, reds, grays, and yellows of the sand and clay laid down centuries ago when during successive ages arms of the sea covered large parts of the North American Continent. Where today the visitor stands and looks out over the naked buttes once lay a mighty sea in which swam monsters whose fossilized skeletons are embedded in the strata laid down by the primordial waters.
Here and there, standing out against the lighter coloring of the sands and clays, are black veins of lignite. Ages ago dense forests, rivaling those of the tropics of today, rose over the swamps of the receding seas. The motorcar speeds through a region where the giant hog, the three-toed horse, and the saber-toothed tiger roamed among lofty trees. The cast-off growth of the forest fell into the swamps below, where, shut away from the air by water and mud, it turned into peat. Centuries later the seas returned to crush it with heavy layers of shale and clay, until pressure and heat drove out most of the volatile oils of the wood, leaving carbon or coal. It is not surprising to find that lignite coal has the same cellular formation as wood, and that it at times bears the imprint of leaves or of whole trunks of trees. The forms of stumps 15 feet in diameter have been found in the coal beds of the State.
Lighting up the dull strata of the buttes are the ever present pinks and reds of scoria—clay burnt into a brick-like shale by the centuries-old fires of burning coal veins. Some of these burning veins still exist in the Badlands, being more easily discoverable in the wintertime, when the heat from combustion causes steam to rise. This burning has been one of the major factors in the production of the present Badlands topography, for as the fires have eaten into the coal veins in the cliffs, the earth has crumbled and been carried away by the rains and streams. These fires were an awesome sight to the Indians, who believed the hills were on fire.
The chief agent, however, in the formation of the Badlands has been the Little Missouri River, which centuries ago began to carve its way down through the soft shales and sandstones with which the early seas had covered the area. Aided by the eroding action of wind, frost, and rain, by huge landslides, and by burning coal veins, the once swift, always silt-laden river and its tributaries have floated away all the age-old clays of the region except these buttes and domes piled in indescribable confusion along the valley floor. The Indians, called the valley "The-place-where-the-hills-look-at-each-other," and the first white explorers, impeded in their travel, named it "bad lands to travel through," a phrase inevitably shortened to Badlands.