Episode 17 — The Most Underrated Park in America — Badlands National Park, South Dakota

The Badlands in late afternoon — a visual record of 23 to 35 million years of sediment deposits, continuously being opened by erosion at approximately one inch per year. The landscape is always becoming.

One hundred miles east of Mount Rushmore, we stopped for fuel in Interior, South Dakota. Interior is a small town that wears its age plainly. The fuel station was of a kind that still exists in parts of rural America that have not been renovated in some decades — antique pumps with analogue faces, faded graphics, the particular smell of a building that has been selling the same things for a very long time. The woman at the register was older and curious in an uncomplicated way. She asked where we were from. We said Scotland. She considered this for a moment. "That must be far away then," she said, working through the geography in real time, a genuine cartographic calculation conducted at a gas station counter in South Dakota. We liked her enormously.

The Badlands appear with the same dramatic unexpectedness as everything else on this trip that has been worth seeing. The flat prairie grassland of the high plains extends to the horizon in every direction, and then the land simply drops — a sharp escarpment into a landscape of such geological strangeness that the prairie context makes it more, not less, disorienting. Sharply eroded buttes and pinnacles and spires rise from the grass in bands of cream, ochre, brown, grey, and rust, their colours arranged in horizontal strata that record millions of years of sediment deposition from ancient rivers and seas. It is an alien landscape in the literal sense — it looks like somewhere else. From photographs, visitors often guess it is in another country. It is in South Dakota. It is, in our assessment, the most underrated national park in the United States.

The geology is Oligocene to Miocene in age — from approximately 23 to 35 million years ago — when this region was a subtropical lowland receiving sediment from rivers draining the ancestral Rocky Mountains. The deposits built up over millions of years, preserving in their layers a record of the animals that lived and died here: saber-toothed cats, ancient horses, miniature deer, three-toed rhinoceroses. The White River Group of sedimentary rocks, as this sequence is called, erodes at a rate of approximately one inch per year, continuously exposing new material. In 2010, a seven-year-old girl on a family visit found a near-complete skull of a new saber-toothed cat species in an eroding bank. She reported it to a ranger. The subsequent excavation produced one of the most significant fossil discoveries of the decade. The Badlands are, among other things, a geological document being slowly opened by the weather.

We camped at Cedar Pass, in a site that offered a direct view of the rock cliffs from our table. The evening stars were among the best of the trip — the Badlands has negligible light pollution, and the formations against the star field created a landscape that seemed genuinely prehistoric.

The following morning brought low cloud and light rain that changed everything. The wet stone turned its colours deeper — the ochres went amber, the creams went grey, the bands of colour became more distinct against each other, the whole landscape softening into something more atmospheric and less harsh than the bright-sun version. We hiked the Notch Trail — a route that climbs through a natural notch in the canyon wall and delivers you to a view across the White River Valley that the main highway overlooks do not provide, a perspective that placed us inside the formations rather than outside them, looking out. Some of the better compositions of the trip came from the Notch.

The Oglala Lakota live near here. Wounded Knee is forty miles south — the site of the 1890 massacre of approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children by the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army, a site of particular gravity and of ongoing meaning to Lakota people today. The last Ghost Dance was performed in this region. The Badlands landscape carries weight that its geological beauty does not announce. You have to bring it with you.

There is one more thing about this part of South Dakota. During the Cold War, the surrounding grasslands hosted a field of one hundred and fifty Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles, standing in hardened silos across thousands of square miles of prairie, armed and ready from 1963 until 1994. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, preserved as a monument, maintains one silo and launch control facility in their operational state. The prairie looks exactly as it always has. The silos are barely visible. Somewhere beneath those endless grass plains, the hardware of the end of the world waited for an order that, thankfully, never came. It is quietly, profoundly unsettling to know this while looking at a landscape that looks like nothing other than itself.

In the evening, we drove 260 miles to Sioux Falls. We found a Walmart. We stocked provisions for the long drive home. We went to sleep without talking much. There are days on a road trip when exhaustion and gratitude become indistinguishable from each other. This was one of those days.

"The Badlands are a geological document being slowly opened by weather — one inch per year, continuously, with no regard for your schedule."

Photography Notes — Episode Seventeen

Conditions: Day one — late afternoon, strong directional light. Night — exceptional dark sky. Day two — overcast with light rain, soft light, saturated colours on wet stone.

The golden hour windows: The Badlands formations respond to low-angle light with a drama that flat midday light cannot approach. The 30–45 minutes either side of sunrise and sunset cast lateral shadows into every crevice and fold of the buttes, creating depth and texture. Set your alarm. The formations closest to the Cedar Pass area are best positioned for morning light.

The overcast opportunity: The most underutilised photographic condition at the Badlands is overcast with light rain. The soft, directionless light allows the colour bands to be read without the harsh shadows of direct sun, and wet stone saturates to colours the dry version cannot match. Most visitors take shelter. Go out and shoot.

The Notch Trail as composition discovery: The perspectives from inside the Badlands formations — looking out rather than in — are not available from the highway overlooks. The Notch Trail is the most accessible route to these interior viewpoints. Carry your tripod; the narrower canyon passages may require slower shutter speeds.

Star trails over the formations: The dark-sky conditions are outstanding. For star trails (as opposed to individual star points), use an interval timer at 30-second exposures, ISO 1600, f/4, for two to three hours, then stack in post. The formations as silhouette anchors beneath rotating star trails produce images unlike anything else on the trip.

The colour banding approach: Treat the geological strata as deliberate compositional layers. Set your tripod and frame so each colour band runs horizontally across the image — use a long telephoto to compress a section of wall into a pure colour-layer composition. No sky, no foreground: just the record of millions of years arranged in rectangles of colour.