South Dakota’s Badlands — and Grasslands

Photographer: Ray Boren
Summary Author: Ray Boren

When mentally summoning an image of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, many of us will visualize a rugged, eroded, virtually impassable terrain — perhaps because of its name. After all, the native Lakota people called the region “mako sica,” which also means “bad lands,” and early visitors such as French fur trappers similarly described the landscape as “les mauvaises terres a traverser”: “Bad lands to travel across.” Modern roads have, thankfully, greatly improved access and also provide captivating viewpoints. In spring and early summer, the park can be appealingly verdant, showcasing a mix of tall and short prairie grasses, speckled with wildflowers, as illustrated in the photos above, taken on June 18, 2025.

The first photo captures a valley rife with sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), thriving beneath ridges and pinnacles across from the park’s Ben Reifel Visitor Center, along the paved Badlands Loop Road. A second picture shows green prairie grasses flourishing to the edge of a bluff along the unpaved Sage Creek Rim Road.  A third is a portrait of an American bison (Bison bison), or buffalo, munching fresh grasses beside a back road to Conata Basin, taken with a telephoto lens from inside a vehicle parked across the road. Reintroduced in 1963, the park’s herd now includes about 1,200 bison.

Most of the greenery will not last through the hot summer and into the fall, a staff member told me at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, for the grasses die back and turn shades from tan to brown.

The park, encompassing 244,000 acres (98,743.3 hectares) east of the Black Hills, occupies a semi-arid region with widely varying seasonal temperatures and low precipitation. The remarkably carved, layered and primarily sedimentary landscape was deposited, lithified and sculpted over the past 75 million years. It's among the most extensive surviving mixed-grass prairie ecosystems in North America, and home to over 400 plant species, notes the U.S. Geological Survey. The even larger Buffalo Gap National Grassland, with almost 600,000 acres (242,811.3 hectares), is a neighbor of the national park.

 

Badlands National Park, South Dakota Coordinates: 43.648,-102.398

Related Links:
Wyoming’s Bridger Basin Badlands
Ecology of Badlands National Park
Prairie Wildflowers and Grasses of North Dakota