We started off our day with a drive thru the Wildlife Loop, Custer state park no bison were to be seen. We saw lots of prairie dogs, a few pronghorn, a wild turkey and burrows. The Rangers had to chase the burrows as they had grouped in the bison corral. Once they’ve been chased across the road, numerous carloads of people disembarked and chased the burrows trying to give them Carrots. 

We visited Wall Drug in South Dakota. What a busy place. Major tourist trap, although it had amazing pie.

Kevin had found, on the Internet, a BLM site that was very close to the entrance of Badlands, and actually looked over Badlands. We drove in on a dirt road that was slightly muddy from the rain and had a few puddles. It was already quite full with campers parked all along the ridge. We drove for quite some time not recognizing how important it was that we were slipping a bit in the mud as we drove. Once when we got to a point where we thought it may not make sense to drive any further, a gentleman in a big four-wheel-drive pick up stopped us and suggested that we may not want to go down the next hill, as we might not be able to make it back up.

We immediately turned around in the grass and started heading back. Very slowly we edged up the first hill… And got stuck. Kevin has never driven in four-wheel-drive low, and wasn’t even sure how to get the jeep into that gear, plus we had to back up towards the edge of the cliff in order to get a run at it. When we had gotten almost far enough for Karen to think we had a good chance, Kevin decided that he wasn’t waiting. In four-wheel-drive low he started up the hill and was able to gain a little bit of traction but about halfway up the hill the front tires started spinning and lost some traction, but he kept going. He made it. But we weren’t anywhere near done we still had a number of hills to go and kept it in four-wheel-drive low, slowly making progress as we came to the last hill and saw how muddy it was. A car with a pop up camper started down the hill and his camper started sneaking up behind him as he slid across the muddy road. We needed to wait for him to get into the grass and then it was time to tackle the last hill. It actually went reasonably well, and at the top of the hill, with only the exit road to go, Kevin finally breathed a sigh of relief. The airstream was not going to the bottom of Badlands today. I don’t think I have ever felt so afraid in my life, and I wasn’t able to calm down until we actually got into the park, and started taking pictures of the prairie dogs and bison that were right in front of us.

Now that we no longer had a campsite again, we decided to drive the 22 miles through the badlands national park in hopes that we could get a site. No such luck….the campground was full. As we drove through the loop we noticed that there were a number of sites not occupied but reserved. Due to the inclement weather and the fact that a site was only $23, we made the assumption that some of them didn’t show up and just helped ourself to one of the very wet spots.