Place Archive

Scenic

Scenic sits along Highway 44 on the northern edge of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, platted in 1907 as a railway shipping point and never growing beyond a small cluster of buildings. The town became known for a saloon operating near reservation land where alcohol sales were otherwise restricted, drawing travelers who otherwise passed through on their way to Badlands National Park. Today only a handful of year-round residents remain, and most of the structures that once lined the townsite have been abandoned or demolished. The Badlands formations that draw visitors to the surrounding area are the product of millions of years of sedimentary layering and erosion, and the adjacent grasslands remain ecologically active despite the near-ghost-town status of Scenic itself.

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Nearby Pages

Badlands National Park Buffalo Gap National Grasslands Custer State Park

Markers

Scenic Photo Locations

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Green grasslands stretch beneath storm clouds near Badlands National Park, South Dakota. — Badlands National Park sits at the edge of a mixed-grass prairie ecosystem, one of the largest protected tracts of this habitat remaining in the United States. The park's 244,000 acres include roughly 64,000 acres of designated wilderness, where grasslands like these transition into the eroded buttes and spires the park is known for. These prairies support bison, bighorn sheep, and the black-footed ferret, reintroduced here in 1994 after near-extinction. The grasses and wetland pockets also help anchor the fragile, fast-eroding sedimentary rock that defines the surrounding badlands terrain.

Tatanka Trading Post, a white wooden building with faded signage, stands abandoned in Scenic, South Dakota. — Scenic, South Dakota sits along the northern edge of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, about eight miles from an entrance to Badlands National Park. The town was platted in 1907 as a shipping point on the Chicago and North Western Railway line and later gained a measure of notoriety for a saloon that operated on reservation land, drawing visitors despite alcohol restrictions nearby. Tatanka Trading Post, its name drawn from the Lakota word for bison, operated as one of a small cluster of retail stops along Highway 44 selling goods and souvenirs to travelers passing through the area. Today the building is among the few structures still standing in Scenic, a town whose year-round population has fallen to only a handful of residents.

Scenic Photo Locations

Minneapolis Photographer