Interior

4 photos · 2019

4 photographs tagged Interior, 2019.

Turquoise tent pitched at Badlands Hotel & Campground in Interior, South Dakota, with picnic table and distant badlands — Interior, South Dakota sits just outside the southeast entrance to Badlands National Park, and campgrounds here cater to visitors drawn to the park's rock formations and hiking trails. Badlands Hotel & Campground is one of the few nearby sites that allows campfires in fire pits, a feature tent campers often seek out. Each site comes with a picnic table set on open grass, with the park's eroded buttes visible along the horizon to the south.

Mixed-grass prairie with water channels and cloudy sky near Badlands National Park, South Dakota. — Badlands National Park spans more than 242,000 acres of mixed-grass prairie and eroded rock formations in southwestern South Dakota. The park was established in 1939, originally as a national monument, before gaining national park status in 1978. Much of the surrounding land outside the park boundary remains in private ranching use, a legacy of homesteading that followed the Homestead Act of 1862. The mixed-grass prairie ecosystem here is considered one of the few large intact examples remaining in North America, supporting native grasses alongside wetland pockets fed by seasonal runoff.

Abandoned wooden shed in yellow wildflower prairie with Badlands buttes and storm clouds, South Dakota. — This weathered wooden shed sits on private land along the edge of Badlands National Park, near the town of Interior, South Dakota. Homestead-era structures like this one are common remnants of the ranching and farming operations that once worked this edge of the prairie before much of the land was absorbed into the park and surrounding grasslands. The Badlands' mixed-grass prairie supports wildflowers such as yellow sweet clover, which spreads quickly through disturbed soil and roadside margins each summer. Thunderstorms building over the nearby buttes and formations are frequent in the region during the warmer months, as moist air from the plains collides with the elevated terrain of the Badlands Wall.

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.

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