Badlands National Park

Badlands National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Badlands lies on the plains of south-western South Dakota, an hour east of Rapid City along Interstate 90, and it is above all a park to drive through, on the way to or from the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore: the Badlands Loop Road, Highway 240, leaves the interstate at one exit and rejoins it at another, thirty-nine miles later, past a dozen overlooks and the trailheads of all the short walks, and takes two hours with stops or a whole day with hikes. The entrance fee is per vehicle for seven days. The tours sold are few and mostly from Rapid City: private day tours by car or van, which combine the loop with Wall Drug, the famous roadside emporium in the town of Wall, and the Minuteman Missile historic site with its preserved Cold War silo and launch control bunker beside the interstate;

wildlife photography tours at dawn and dusk along the unpaved Sage Creek Rim Road, where the bison and prairie dogs are; electric-bike tours of the loop; and short flights by small aeroplane from Wall. The park's own rangers offer free talks, a fossil preparation laboratory open to view in summer at the Ben Reifel visitor centre, and night-sky programmes with telescopes. Unusually, the park has an open hike policy, which allows walking anywhere, off trail, over the formations, and the short marked trails near the eastern entrance, the Door, the Window and the Notch, with its log ladder up a cliff, take an hour or two between them. Cedar Pass Lodge, with cabins, and two campgrounds, one of them free and primitive at Sage Creek, are the only places to stay inside.

Visiting Badlands National Park: what you will see

The Badlands were made a national monument in 1939 and a national park in 1978, and cover 982 square kilometres in two parts: the North Unit, which holds the scenery, the road and a designated wilderness, and the South Unit, or Stronghold District, which lies within the Pine Ridge reservation, is managed together with the Oglala Lakota, and includes the site of Ghost Dances of 1890, held weeks before the massacre at Wounded Knee, forty miles to the south. The Lakota called the place mako sica, bad land, and French trappers les mauvaises terres à traverser, for the same reason: a wall of steep, crumbling, waterless clay a hundred kilometres long, cutting across the prairie. The formations are young and short-lived. Layers of mud, sand and volcanic ash, laid down by a shallow sea and then by rivers between about 75 and 28 million years ago, began to be cut by the White River and its tributaries only half a million years ago, and are eroding at about an inch a year, so that in another half million they will be gone;

the bands, grey, tan, yellow, pink and rust red, mark ancient soils, and the Yellow Mounds their most vivid. The beds are among the richest sources of Oligocene mammal fossils in the world, studied since 1846: three-toed horses, hornless rhinoceroses, the pig-like oreodonts, sabre-toothed nimravids and the great titanotheres, and in 2010 a seven-year-old visitor found a sabre-tooth skull beside the visitor centre. Above and below the wall stretches the largest protected expanse of mixed-grass prairie in the United States, with about 1,200 bison, bighorn sheep on the cliffs near Pinnacles, pronghorn, mule deer, coyotes, swift foxes, prairie rattlesnakes, and towns of black-tailed prairie dogs, into which the black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, was reintroduced in 1994.

Badlands National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open twenty-four hours a day, all year, with the Ben Reifel visitor centre from about 8 am to 4 or 5 pm, longer in summer. June to August is the season, hot, often above 38 degrees, with violent thunderstorms, hail and lightning in the afternoons, and the unpaved roads turn to impassable gumbo when wet; May, September and early October are the best months; winter is bitter, windy and empty, with snow on the banded rock a rare and beautiful sight.

Sunrise, from Big Badlands Overlook or the Door, and sunset, from Pinnacles or Conata Basin, are when the colours appear, and the flat light of midday hides them. Early August brings hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists through on their way to the Sturgis rally. Allow half a day to a day. Wall is at the western exit, Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park and Wind Cave an hour and a half west, and Wounded Knee an hour south.