South Dakota: Badlands

Our second day in South Dakota we drove through the Badlands. There were some pretty spectacular sites there, and I was surprised at how beautiful such an unfriendly landscape could be.

It was incredibly dry there, and you could see that on the ground which was cracked from drying so quickly.

Yet somehow there was quite a bit of wildlife that lived there, bison, birds, snakes, and goats. But of course it wouldn't be a real vacation for me unless we saw some ground squirrels.

And oh boy did we see ground squirrels! We drove on a horrible gravel road to get to this little prairie dog town, but we were rewarded when we got there and discovered that they were incredibly friendly little rodents.

Well, they were friendly because they knew that we had food. Granola bars, actually. B and I helped the nieces to feed them, and they screamed with happiness when the little guys came out of their burrows to feast on granola bar. Well, I screamed with happiness too.

Only later did we find out that it was illegal to feed the prairie dogs. Oops.