![]() ![]() Sod-covered buttes represent the Ice Age-era prairie, where ancient hunters left behind bison bones and arrowheads up to 12,000 years old. Rock layers that stacked up over about 75 million years began eroding a half-million years ago, sculpted into channels and canyons by the Cheyenne and White rivers. They are both badlands - a geologic term for soft sedimentary rocks that erode easily - and Badlands, a title derived from the Native American Lakota name “mako sica” or “bad lands,” referring to the scarcity of water, difficulty of navigating peaks and valleys and weather extremes that bake the ground in summer and freeze it in winter.Īs badlands, the 244,000-acre national park preserves a naturally excavated landscape revealing Earth's history. En español | Striped in yellow, amber and purple, the painted walls and serrated peaks of Badlands National Park dip and rise amid the prairie grasslands, making for a stunning surprise in remote western South Dakota.
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