Badlands National Park

All my life I've heard about the Badlands of South Dakota. What the hell is a badland?

After seeing the eclipse, the badlands were the last stop before making the long slog home. What's a badland? If you ask me, it's a lot of eroded dirt.

Badlands

 This was easily the worst light of the entire two-week trip, so most of the landscape had that washed-out look. On the relatively flat, dry grassland above the badlands, I drove through an endless prairie dog town. It seemed to go on for miles. As far as the eye could see, in all directions, there were dirt mounds, dry grass picked to the stub, and scurrying furry rodents. There were occasional bison, usually too far away to photograph or not doing anything interesting. But there was one animal that was new to me. There was a fleeting encounter with bighorn sheep.

Bighorn Sheep

And that's the end of the blog entries about this road trip that I made with my son. It was a lot of driving, with a lot of corn along the way. I visited five new states, saw an eclipse, visited four national parks, two national monuments, and one national wildlife refuge. This leaves only three states that I've never visited (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Oregon), , and now I'm on the lookout for opportunities to complete the list...