The Badlands

I spy with my little eye…six bison. The road is another couple miles behind that ridge on the left.

This is my chapel.
My parishioners this morning were a herd of bison; how kind of them to share their space with me.
We had a fellowship of nearly four hours on a fine Sunday morning.
The pictures, of course, do not do the scene justice. They're just dots of color printed on a rectangular screen.
I could have captured the GPS coordinates, but they're meaningless, just numbers and a map.
This specific scene is not the chapel, rather, this experience is the chapel. Chart your own course, find some space away from life and society and cities of men.
The rational mind, the classical mind, must be set aside; the experiential, the romantic, must be engaged.
To practice here, you must be present, in the now, engaging all of your senses, lost in the expanse, quiet in the mind.
You need to feel the stare of a bison, as you give it a wide berth, while he never takes his eyes off of you.
You need to watch the antelope sprint away. The birds, the wind, the smell, mindful of every footfall in choosing a safe course.
Be here, be present, be now.
Oh! Give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.

When I arrived at the Sage Creek Campground Friday about an hour before dusk (free with park entrance, no running water), I got to cooking straight away (beans & rice with stewed canned tomatoes and a dal masala mix—entirely shelf-stable :)). At the end of the campground, maybe 100 metres away, were a half dozen bison, having a dinner of their own. I had an amazing stream of consciousness at the moment along the lines of, "It's really happening! I'm cooking on a camp stove at a campground 'out west,' and there is wildlife sharing the space with me!" So awesome.

Saturday. An amazing feature of the Badlands is that backcountry is unrestricted—you don't even need a permit to camp, just stay out of sight from the main road. So this morning I went to a pull off, a vista, a point most people stop and take a photo and then drive away from. I took the photo, and then I walked off into it (pictured, left). It was fantastic, surreal even, and just perfect. The country is relatively flat, the road is up high and running east-west, so I went south, then west, then back north until I hit the road again. I was at hiking for a solid three hours and the terrain is just stunning. The most amazing thing is how you can plan a route from a vantage point and end up being totally wrong when you get there. That's not a solid field of grass, it's punctuated by streams and bluffs. Those soft clay hills are actually steep and impassible up close. Bumping into bison and having to give a wide berth. And so on. Just amazing. Stepping into the postcard picture.

Now I'm back at the campground blogging, editing photos, and about to cook some Italian sausage with grilled peppers and onions and rice. Yay fresh food! :) Oh and cold cider. Yay ice!

Sunday. I built a little cairn today when I was sufficiently into the backcountry. It made me wonder: will any human ever see this again? I'm maybe 4 miles from the main road, I only see bison footprints and no human ones. This cairn is on top of eroding clay. Will it erode before another human sees it? Could I even find it if I tried? I do hope someone sees it--I like think that they'll notice it, ponder it, and wonder when it was put there and by whom.

The diversity in the topology here is staggering and breathtaking. One minute you're fighting through an overgrown muddy patch, the next climbing over a hot clay hill, the next in a meadow with trees, cactus, and bees.

A moment on Wall Drug. It is a store mostly dedicated to tourist kitsch, with a café, ice cream parlour, candy shop, western wear shop, etc. What really sets it apart is the sheer number of billboards advertising it. Still in Minnesota on I-90, there were signs such as "Only 350 miles until Wall Drug." There are literally dozens of these billboards, and on 90 in South Dakota, there ain't much else to look at. So you really get it in your head that Wall Drug must really be something, even though it’s the only thing to see in Wall, SD. Well done, Wall Drug, well done.