South Dakota, Part 7 - Another "Notch" On Our Belts, and a Drive Through the Badlands [240517]

On our final day in the Badlands, we explored parts of the Park that we hadn't been to yet.

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Another day, another early morning sunrise attempt - this time at the Big Badlands Overlook.  The clouds were a little more cooperative on this Friday morning.

Christine toddled off to bed after the sun came up, but this cute little baby sunrise bunny kept Tom company, coming out from the under the boardwalk whenever the the tourists left.

Meanwhile, swallows passed overhead on their way to/from nests in the rocks like these.

And a lone Evening Primrose reached for the early morning sun from the rocky soil (we had seen a couple of stray plants on the Castle Trail hike yesterday, but none were in as good shape as this one).

Since the forecast was for another warm day (85 degrees predicted) we headed straight to the Notch Trail trailhead for breakfast and a hike after the time lapse was done.  The Notch Trail was much more exciting and adventuresome than the previous day's hike, quickly taking you into a canyon...

...and then up this ladder (video sped up 3.5x to meet Blogger file size restrictions; "classic" music and soundfx added just for fun)...

...then walking along a ledge with a pretty good drop-off on one side (photos below are looking back toward the narrow path section)...

...until the path widens out again and and you can continue upward.  Along the way there's an area where a green ribbon runs through the rock from high on the wall down to the path.

Then we arrived at the Notch.  Well, we arrived at a Notch.  The trail markers sort of pittered out after a certain point, and there were no signs anywhere, so we just followed the other hikers up and this is where most of them went.

But as we explored some of the other paths, we found notches at the end of them too.

On the return trip, Tom thought that he might take video of walking the narrow ledge section - but changed his mind fairly quickly.

After lunch, we drove the road to the other end of the park, stopping at every overlook along the way - and blasting the air conditioner in between.  It was a good activity for an afternoon where the actual temperatures were around 92 degrees - well higher than forecasted.  The first "new" sight of interest is Norbeck Pass, which is the transition between the lower and upper prairies (seen here at 3x - the T42 couldn't have made it up the pass at this speed, even if we had tried 😉).

Next up was the White River Valley Overlook.

You may recognize Big Foot Pass Overlook from our sunset excursion Wednesday night.  Interesting/confusingly, NPS spells "Big Foot" on their signs and in their literature both with and without the space.  However, the pass was named for (Miniconjou Lakota) Chief Big Foot, who took his people through the pass in December 1890; they were all massacred at Wounded Knee five days later.

Panorama Point Overlook.

The Burns Basin Overlook looks down over an old sheep farm.  With all the canyons, we imagine that "Little Bo Peep" situations weren't uncommon for ol' Farmer Burns.  We found the little cave (right of center, 3/4 of the way down the photo) particularly interesting.

And in case you were wondering:  yes, there are bison in Badlands National Park.

If there were the remnants of any old homesteads, we weren't able to see them from the Homestead Overlook.

From the Conata Basin Overlook you could start seeing examples of "paleosols" - ancient soils that took on bright colors due to chemicals from decaying plants, and then were fossilized - in the bright yellow and red bands.

We got a closer look from the Yellow Mounds Overlook.

Pinnacles Overlook.

We found the story of the Hay Buttes particularly amusing, imagining what the large hay zipline must've looked like, back in the day.

Turning around, we parked at the Conata Basin Overlook again for about 30 minutes so that Tom could take a nap (the nap-less early morning having finally caught up to him); the coach A/C kept the bedroom area nice and chilly for him.  Back on the road, we pulled over by a prairie dog field to listen to the local gossip for a while.

The wind had been picking up, blowing clouds in again, so we decided not to attempt another sunset anywhere and just headed back to camp.  Here's part of the drive back through the lower prairie (again at 3x speed):

Our final evening in the Badlands was an uneventful one, with cool winds finally blowing in around 8 pm.  Tomorrow we'd be heading toward Wyoming on our next adventure...