Gravel Road Along Indian Creek, Badlands National Park

Indian Creek Drive is one of several unpaved routes that cut through the mixed-grass prairie of Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota. The park itself covers roughly 244,000 acres and was established in 1978, though the eroded buttes and spires along routes like this one have been forming for the better part of half a million years as wind and water wear away layers of Oligocene-era sediment. Roads such as this provide access to the park's more remote grassland sections, where bison, bighorn sheep, and black-footed ferrets — reintroduced here in the 1990s after being considered extinct in the wild — still range. The surrounding terrain sits within the traditional homeland of the Oglala Lakota, and much of the park's south unit remains co-managed with the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Photo taken in July 2019.