Kevin and I started the morning by breaking camp at the wonderful hour of 4am. The night before, we parked on a little used road, grabbed our gear and hiked out into the Badlands to set up camp. The park required us to be half a mile from any road or trail and not visible from roads or trails. Considering that we set up at dusk, and broke down before dawn, I’d say we fulfilled at least part of those requirements…

We attempted some star trail photos before we went to bed last night. Basically, we set our cameras up on the tripods at the top of the bowl we were camping in, set an alarm for 45 minutes and crawled in, waking up to collect our gear. I wasn’t really happy with the result, but didn’t want to stay up the entire night and hike the few miles it would take to get a truly awesome shot (‘ll post it at the end of this post). Kevin… well, his camera battery died sometime during the exposure. Since I think I’ll be coming back through South Dakota at the end of my trip, another stop at the Badlands will be in order to complete my vision and take a few shots we didn’t get on our first trip.

After our sunrise photos, we took a couple short hikes to scout some locations and grabbed a half-hour nap in the visitor center’s parking lot until they opened so we could poke around. There were a couple cute exhibits… nothing terribly exciting, but we did learn a little bit about geology while we were there.

A drive all the way through the north section of the park, through a herd of bison, led to Sage Creek campground where we could throw up our tent to dry out and catch a bit of a nap in the car. After that… well, we decided to let ourselves get caught by South Dakota’s biggest tourist trap, Wall Drug.

Now Wall Drug… there simply is no way to describe this place except as a tourist trap. It’s absolutely huge, seems to be composed of what is actually 10-15 smaller stores, and we didn’t even venture into “the backyard”. Regardless, Kevin bought a toy bow and arrow set as part of a work gag and I found myself a hat…

Yeah… I bought a Stetson. A wool Stetson that is crushable, but a Stetson nonetheless. Did I mention this place is a tourist trap? The… mannequin there to have your picture taken with should really be a dead giveaway. And yeah… Kevin posed there too:

Having whored ourselves out enough, we headed back to the Badlands… to find that our nice direct light of the morning had become diffused due to cloud cover. We didn’t despair however and headed into the park, tried some light hiking and waited it out. Sure enough, it cleared and we got in a couple hours of hiking and photography before it rolled back in for the evening. Dinner at the Cedar Pass Lodge (the park’s restaurant) was horrid – I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat and eaten food that tasted that bad in a restaurant before and left the two of us wishing we’d taken the time to find somewhere out of the rain that had started to fall to cook something.

Back through the entire park, pausing to take pictures along the way (including some great shots of bighorn sheep climbing the rocks) brought us back to the Sage Creek campground shortly after sunset (8:30ish this time of year) were we sacked out around 9am for an long and enjoyable night’s sleep.

And finally, the star trail pictures (expect a big picture sometime soon when I can find somewhere with an electrical outlet and an internet connection for long enough to do some post-processing and uploading.