National Parks and Recreation

Happy 2025!! I hope everyone had a great holiday season.

It’s time for me to wrap up our national park adventures from 2024. Back in October, we did a weeklong trip to the Dakotas (ending in Grand Forks for a BU hockey game, of course) to visit all the national parks there as well as explore the Black Hills, Devil’s Tower just over the border in Wyoming, and Mount Rushmore. We had a GREAT time! We lucked out with weather so much and the crowds were nonexistent, it was truly the perfect time to go.

First up: Badlands National Park!

We started the trip as a foursome. I was kind of surprised when our friends expressed interest in joining James and I for our full weeklong adventure in the Dakotas instead of just meeting us for the hockey games, but I was pumped! The four of us flew into Minneapolis and then set off on the 8-hour long drive to Wall Drug. But we had to make a quick stop first:

Mitchell, South Dakota is home to the World’s Only Corn Palace. Obviously. We arrived after it had closed, but we could still walk around and stretch our legs for the long drive and see all the corn art surrounding the building. Truly a bizarre and wonderful place!

The next morning I made everyone get up bright and early to catch the sunrise over the badlands and it did not disappoint. We began at the Door/Window/Notch trailheads parking lot. Unfortunately, the Notch trail was closed at the time due to repairs but has since reopened. We had a lot of fun on the Door Trail finding all the different poles to follow the trail, but you’re basically given free reign to wander around the rocks. The dream.

These badland rock formations started appearing 500,000 years ago and have a lifespan of about one million years, eroding approximately one inch per year.

I loved the clear lines on the rocks delineating the different geological eras. The only other time we had seen anything remotely like this was in the Blue Forest in Petrified Forest National Park. It was cool to see an entire park dedicated to these badland formations.

The trail leading up to the view of the badlands is also really interesting. It definitely felt like another planet.

What surprised me most about Badlands was how easy it was to see basically the entire park in a day. Almost every hiking trail is less than a mile long and none of them are particularly difficult. There are definitely ways to extend your experience, but it kind of surprised me how contained and, I guess, uninvolved this park was. Even if you do nothing but drive the park road, you’ll experience most of it.

We then wandered over to the Window Trail, which is a short 5 minute flat walk out to another viewpoint.

The Door Trail was definitely superior and I hope to get to see the Notch Trail at some point in the future.

From there we wandered over to the Cliff Shelf Trail, an easy half-mile walk along some boardwalks.

This trail was definitely the most unique in the park. It felt like an entirely new landscape.

Again, we had most of these trails almost entirely to ourselves. It was great!

And then our last hike of the park was up Saddle Pass. This was a steep climb straight up and it was a little sketchy at times with the loose sand. But we all made it!

Peek-a-boo!

With all our hiking done by 9:30am, we spent the rest of the day just driving the rest of the scenic drive and pulling over whenever something struck our fancy.

I particularly loved the Yellow Mounds Overlook.

Especially the purple layer.

And then it was finally time for some wildlife!

As we got to the western part of the park, there were buffalo EVERYWHERE! And this cool bighorn sheep.

Also of note: we were listening to the Bills game on the radio as we drove through the park and they finally started doing well once we started seeing the buffalo. Coincidence? I think not.

We ended up driving the few miles up a dirt road to Roberts Prairie Dog Town, and it was cool to see them all around us, but we ended up seeing so many prairie dogs throughout this trip on almost every single road that it definitely wasn’t worth it to go out of your way for them.

But they are so darn cute! Just don’t get too close. Even modern day prairie dogs carry the plague (what we know as Black Death) after it was introduced back in the early 1900s from the rats aboard Asian trade ships. Park rangers try to control the disease and protect these animals within the park by giving them an oral vaccine. Fun fact: they tried out a bunch of different flavors and found that the prairie dogs prefer peanut butter. Same!

Honestly, this park just kind of fell flat for me. We got some amazing pictures and enjoyed our time there, but we literally felt like we had seen every single thing by 1pm. I had thought it was going to be one of my favorite national parks, period. It was just strange and not at all what I expected.

This isn’t all necessarily a bad thing, though. It’s pretty cool that you can see it so quickly! And if you ever find yourself driving I-90 through South Dakota, definitely take the extra couple of hours to loop through the badlands. You won’t regret it.

And perhaps most importantly, do NOT miss out on Wall Drug!

I’d heard the lore of Wall Drug for years, a road trippers roadside paradise. You may have seen it featured in the Academy Award-winning film Nomadland. Frances McDormand works there as one of her temp jobs. Or you may have seen it if you’ve ever driven within 500 miles of South Dakota on I-90 because there are billboards EVERYWHERE, advertising everything from the free ice water to the 5-cent coffee. It’s like South of the Border in the Carolinas if you’re from the South, you can’t escape it.

As someone who did a two and a half week long van trip through the eastern half of the country and came away thinking the World’s Largest Truck Stop off I-80 in Iowa was my favorite part, it probably comes as no surprise that I was fully prepared to fall in love with Wall Drug as well. And I did.

The property is HUGE! And they have ever single thing you could imagine. A shop for every souvenir, article of clothing, and gift you could think of. An outdoor play area for kids. A chapel. A restaurant, an ice cream shop, and on and on and on.

You could spend actual days here. And it was the perfect way for us to close out our day in the Badlands.

And, of course, we absolutely got the 5-cent coffee!

At the end of the day, I still wholeheartedly recommend checking out Badlands National Park, I would just make it a part of a larger trip to South Dakota. You really only need one day in the Badlands and there is so much more cool nature to see and explore in this area. From here, we picked up another travel companion and went on to Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills National Forest and Custer State Park.

All that to come next time!