🇺🇸 United States · Great Plains
Badlands National Park, in South Dakota, protects one of the most staggering, otherworldly landscapes on the Great Plains: a maze of pinnacles, canyons, spires, buttes and eroded rock formations rising abruptly and in many colors out of a sea of prairie. The rock layers, striped in ochre, red, gold and gray, create an almost lunar setting that shifts with the light through the day and leaves travelers speechless.
For anyone traveling the region, the Badlands are a spectacular, easy stop, often combined with nearby Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. A scenic road (the Badlands Loop Road) crosses the heart of the park with numerous overlooks, and there are trails for every level. Beyond the geology, the park protects one of the largest expanses of protected mixed-grass prairie in the country, home to bison, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep and other animals, and it is one of the richest fossil beds in the world.
This guide covers the essentials of Badlands National Park with a practical eye: the scenic road and its overlooks, the main trails, the wildlife and the prairie, the night sky (this is a notable stargazing destination), the geology and the fossils, and logistics tips such as the extreme weather and the closeness of Rushmore and the quirky town of Wall, with its famous Wall Drug.
The Badlands formations are the result of millions of years of sedimentation and, over the last few hundred thousand years, of rapid erosion by water and wind, which is still carving the landscape at a rate of about 2,5 cm per year. The area, inhabited and traveled by peoples such as the Lakota (who called it 'mako sica', bad land, because of how hard the terrain was), also preserves rich fossil beds of prehistoric mammals. The park's South Unit is managed in cooperation with the Oglala Lakota tribe within the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was protected as a national monument in 1939 and raised to national park in 1978. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of the presidential faces and the Black Hills: sacred land of the Lakota, setting of the Deadwood gold rush and of the Wounded Knee massacre, of the Badlands, the bison and the monuments of Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.
Read the history of South Dakota →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Lakota called them 'mako sica' —bad land— and the French explorers 'les mauvaises terres à traverser', the bad lands to cross. Both agreed: this maze of color-striped pinnacles, without water or shade, was one of the most inhospitable places on the Great Plains. And yet that same harshness hides a double treasure: an archive of 75 million years of Earth's history written into its rock layers, and one of the richest beds of mammal fossils on the planet. The most astonishing part is that this whole landscape is fleeting: it erodes so fast that, in geological time, it is doomed to disappear.
The spectacular landscape of Badlands National Park is the result of a long, two-stage geological process: a long phase of sedimentation followed by rapid erosion. For tens of millions of years the region was covered first by inland seas and later by plains and forests, where sediments of different colors and composition were laid down layer upon layer: clays, volcanic ash, sands and organic remains. Those layers, visible today as the characteristic horizontal color bands in the rock, record millions of years of environmental history.
The second stage, far more recent, began around half a million years ago, when rivers and streams started cutting into and eroding those soft layers of sediment. Water, ice and wind rapidly sculpted the terrain, creating the maze of pinnacles, spires, canyons and buttes that defines the Badlands. This is geologically fast erosion: the landscape is still changing today, and it is estimated that these formations could disappear, entirely eroded away, in a relatively near geological future.
The combination of soft rock, sparse vegetation and a semi-arid climate with intense, sporadic rainfall keeps the erosion actively going. That is why every storm continues to shape the Badlands, in a living process that turns the park into an open book of geology, where you can read millions of years of Earth's history with the naked eye.
The sediment layers of the Badlands not only record environmental change, they have preserved one of the richest beds of mammal fossils in the world, corresponding above all to the period known as the Oligocene, tens of millions of years ago. Animals now extinct lived and were fossilized in this region: ancient relatives of the horse and the rhinoceros, giant tortoises, prehistoric carnivores and many others. Since the 19th century the Badlands have been essential ground for paleontology, and fossils are still being found and studied in the park today.
Long before the Europeans arrived, the region was inhabited and traveled for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. In more recent times the area formed part of the territory of the Lakota (Sioux) people. It was the Lakota who coined the name that describes the place: 'mako sica', usually translated as 'bad land' or 'hard land', referring to the broken terrain, the scarcity of water and the high temperatures, which made it an arduous place to cross. French explorers called it something similar ('les mauvaises terres à traverser'), which is where the name 'Badlands' comes from.
The area also holds deep historical significance for the Lakota: the southern sector of today's park, within the Pine Ridge Reservation, is tied to tragic episodes of Indigenous resistance in the late 19th century, near the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. That sector is administered today in collaboration with the Oglala Lakota Nation.
Recognition of the extraordinary scenic, geological and paleontological value of the Badlands led to their official protection in the 20th century. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Badlands National Monument, taking the first steps toward preserving the area and opening it to visitors, with the construction of scenic roads and services that made tourism possible in this remote corner of South Dakota.
In 1978 the area was redesignated as Badlands National Park, raising its level of protection and recognition. Today the park protects not only the eroded formations but also one of the largest stretches of protected mixed-grass prairie in the United States, an ecosystem that once covered much of the center of the country and is now scarce. This prairie is home to bison, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep and other species, and has been the setting for successful conservation programs, such as the reintroduction of the bison and of the endangered black-footed ferret.
The park is managed in two sectors: the northern one, more accessible and more visited, with the scenic road and the visitor center; and the southern one, within the Pine Ridge Reservation, administered in cooperation with the Oglala Lakota Nation. Today the Badlands bring together the conservation of a unique landscape, a world-class fossil heritage, a prairie ecosystem and the memory of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.
The transformation of the Badlands into a tourist destination is closely tied to the history of the roads of the American West and to the rise of car travel. In the early 20th century, when the area was still practically inaccessible, the construction of the state highway and of the future scenic route (today's Badlands Loop Road) opened the heart of the formations to visitors for the first time. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) —Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal employment program— worked in the area building infrastructure, roads and services, laying the groundwork for the future park, which would be declared a national monument in 1939.
No account of tourism in the Badlands is complete without Wall Drug. In 1931, Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought a small drugstore in the dusty town of Wall, by the north entrance. The business was languishing until, in 1936, Dorothy had the idea of putting up signs along the highway offering 'free ice water' to the thirsty travelers crossing the plains on their way to the newly opened Mount Rushmore. The trick was a resounding success: cars began stopping in droves, and Wall Drug grew into an enormous, extravagant roadside store-attraction, advertised by thousands of signs scattered along highways across the country (and even the world). It still serves five-cent coffee today and is an iconic, kitschy stop on the trip.
Over the course of the 20th century, the combination of the scenic route, the closeness of Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, and phenomena like Wall Drug cemented the Badlands as an essential stop on the great American West road trip. Redesignation as a national park in 1978 reinforced that profile, and today the park receives around a million visitors a year, who arrive above all by car, faithful to the road-trip tradition that made its name.