Scenic

3 photos · 2019

3 photographs tagged Scenic, 2019.

Related: Ghost Town South Dakota Badlands Badlands National Park National Park South Dakota Badlands
Yellow center line marks Highway 44 stretching through Badlands National Park's eroded buttes and grasslands, South Dakota.
Highway 44 runs along the southern edge of Badlands National Park, linking the town of Interior to Rapid City and serving as an alternate route to the more heavily traveled Badlands Loop Road (Highway 240). The park itself was designated in 1978, though the area had been protected as a national monument since 1939. Badlands National Park spans roughly 244,000 acres of mixed-grass prairie and eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires formed by deposits laid down between 69 and 75 million years ago. Erosion continues to reshape the formations at a rate of about an inch per year, among the fastest in the world.

A Lonely Stretch of Highway 44 in Badlands National Park

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.

Mixed-Grass Prairie Along Badlands National Park’s Northern Boundary

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.

Faded Tatanka Trading Post Sign in Scenic, South Dakota

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