Approximately 60 miles (or around 100 kilometers) east of Rapid City, South Dakota is Badlands National Park, a rugged and sprawling area under the National Park Service. Continuing on my journey to get as much value as possible out of my America the Beautiful Annual Pass and visiting as many national parks as reasonable during my road trip, I decided to stop by Badlands.

I mentioned this in a previous blog post, but my stay in Rapid City hasn’t particularly been optimal due to the weather—it has been unmanageably windy (up to the point where a box containing a large pizza—which isn’t exactly the lightest thing ever—literally nearly took flight out of my hand, and would have if I didn’t notice and clamp down on it with my chin), and I also got snowed in for a few of the days… not to mention the overall extremely cold temperatures.

Because of this, I was unsure how many more opportunities I would have to get out and explore, so I decided to assume that I wouldn’t be able to return to Badlands, and planned to be able to see as much as I could in one day.

Like usual, I took a ton of photos. I tried to take pictures of informative signs along the way, but it’s very difficult to remember exactly where each pho­to­graph was taken because my Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II doesn’t have built-in GPS, and I take a ton of stops.

With that being said, I took stops in this order, and the photos below are posted in chronological order: Hay Butte Overlook → Pinnacles Overlook → Ancient Hunters Overlook → Yellow Mounds Overlook → Conata Basin Overlook → Homestead Overlook → Burns Basin Overlook → Prairie Wind Overlook → Panorama Point → Bigfoot Pass Overlook → White River Valley Overlook → Fossil Exhibit Trail.

From there, I arrived at the Saddle Pass Trailhead. Because I had a plan to see as much as possible in a single day, I didn’t really do that many hikes—I would only take quick walks no longer than half a mile at each overlook and viewpoint—but I definitely wanted to hike Saddle Pass Trail because of how allegedly technical and challenging it was. With that in mind, I started climbing and realized that, yes, it was indeed extremely technical and challenging.

Then I arrived at a huge mountain. I had already scrambled up and scaled a bunch of rocks, and even crawled under some small openings in the rocks to get to where I was, and realized there was absolutely no way that it could get even more difficult—up to the point where you’re basically rock climbing now—and still be listed as a “trail.” My realization was correct—when I backtracked and looked around a bit, I discovered that I completely missed the real trail and went the very wrong direction. The real trail was much, much easier, and although it was relatively steep, it was completely manageable.

There was a very nice view from the top.

After Saddle Pass, I made a quick pass through Cliff Shelf Nature Trail, then arrived at my second “main” hike, Notch Trail. Although these trails that I’ve been hiking have been relatively short, I had completed a lot of them by that point, so the fatigue was very slowly building up. Still, Notch Trail was the one I was looking most forward to, as it was one of the top-rated trails on AllTrails for Badlands National Park.

If you look closely at the photograph below, you’ll see a wooden ladder in the middle leading up to the top of the hill. That was the most challenging part of the climb, and this trail is definitely not for people who are afraid of heights or have ankle or knee problems, especially considering that the lad­der was a little wobbly at some areas, but if you’re comfortable with your maneuverability and climb confidently, it’s definitely doable. There was a bit of traffic backed up there as people tried to get up and down, but everyone I saw eventually made it.

I feel like Notch Trail would’ve been fairly leisurely for the remainder of the hike, but the high winds during the day I visited made it a bit more tricky. There are some areas along the middle of the trail that has some pretty steep bluffs, so I had to be careful not to be blown off balance and risk falling. I eventually made it to the summit, which had some amazing views.

For some reason, I don’t really have too many great photos from the top that I find satisfying (either that, or there isn’t really much in the pictures to provide visual scale to see just how high up it was taken), but I think a big “wow” aspect of the hike here is the contrast between the climb and the sum­mit. Throughout the hike, you’re generally surrounded by a lot of rock and have fairly limited forward visibility due to the path winding between rock formations. However, once you reach the top, you suddenly have an explosively wide, vast view of Badlands National Park facing south.

After Notch Trail, I also walked the Window Trail, named as such because the end of the trail has a rock formation that looks like a window. … This photograph below clearly is not that window, but it was on my SD card chronologically during the time that I would’ve been at Window Trail, and it was unique scenery relative to the rest of Badlands, so I decided to share it.

My final hike of the day was Door Trail. From the parking lot, it leads down to an area where you can read about the Badlands’ badness via some in­for­ma­tional signs, and then take some stairs to walk out directly into the badlands. The trail takes you about half a mile out, and is named “door” be­cause it is supposed to be a door to the real badlands—the trailless backcountry badlands of over 300 square miles (or approximately 800 square kil­o­me­ters) surrounded by the Badlands Loop State Scenic Byway, Interstate 90, South Dakota Highway 44, and South Dakota Highway 73.

For my final stop before reconnecting onto Interstate 90 and heading back to Rapid City, I took a stop at the Big Badlands Overlook, the location where a lot of the most signature photos of Badlands National Park are taken.

Badlands was very different than the other recent national parks I’ve visited—Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, Arches, and Wind Cave. Although Bad­lands might not have been as impressive or breathtaking as some of the bigger national parks, Badlands still had its own special charm to it—the charm of something being so rugged, yet still having its own unique kind of beauty.

I don’t have a map with GPS tracking because my walks and hikes were split up across many smaller trails, but according to my fitness tracker, my total distance was right around 9 miles. That ended up being very similar to my hike at the Grand Canyon this past December, but it was a lot less tiring be­cause this was nine miles split up over several hours with many driving breaks in between.

If you choose to make your own trip to Badlands National Park, I think a two-day trip is the minimum you’ll need to see everything there is to see, and still do enough activities to make it feel like you’ve experienced the true Badlands experience. I only took stops along South Dakota Highway 240, but there are many other paths you can take to see other areas of Badlands.

On my way from Scottsbluff, Nebraska to Rapid City, South Dakota, I took a stop at Wind Cave National Park, a national park a little north of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Ever since booking this segment of my road trip, I’ve been particularly looking forward to Wind Cave, as this would be the first time I would be spelunking—I regularly hike upwards onto mountains, but never downwards into the earth.

At the time of my visit to Wind Cave, it had only been one week into spring, so it was still considered off-season for tourism, and not all the ranger-guided tours were available. One of the tours that were available was the Fairgrounds Tour, rated by the National Park Service as “strenuous,” which is the one I selected.

The Fairgrounds Tour is a one-and-a-half hour walk through a large portion of the cave, allowing visitors to see many different aspects of the cave sys­tem. As of today, it is also the longest tour during which you are allowed to take photographs; the more difficult and involved Candlelight Tour and Wild Cave Tour both prohibit phones and cameras for safety reasons.

Self-guided tours are not permitted, and for good reason—Wind Cave is the densest cave system in the world, meaning it has the greatest passage volume per cubic mile, offering many opportunities to get lost and die alone without GPS or cellular signal.

Prior to the beginning of our tour, the ranger showed us a map that had extremely complex lines drawn in multiple different colors on top of each other (with the shade of color representing the vertical axis) and packed in a small space. At first, I thought that the map covered a large area and potentially even extended as far as the nearby Black Hills National Forest, but I later learned that the scale of the entire map was only one mile from one edge to the other.

We entered Wind Cave via elevator out of a special room. When we first went a few hundred feet underground, it was clearly extremely windy—the at­mos­pher­ic pressure changes causes extreme wind in Wind Cave—but once we actually entered the cave, we couldn’t feel the wind anymore.

I took a lot of photos during the tour, but note that I took them in camera raw format and heavily edited and enhanced them prior to posting them here. Wind Cave is extremely dim, which meant my camera had a lot of difficulty capturing clean, crisp images. (I took some photos with my camera’s flash on, but that didn’t really help either, because then that would just overilluminate nearby cave structures and leave far-away rocks still dark; I ended up not posting any photos from flash photography.)

Wind Cave is apparently the place with the most boxwork in the world—approximately 95% of the world’s discovered boxwork is inside Wind Cave. Ac­cording to the ranger, boxwork forms when cracks in soft rock are filled with a harder substance, and then the remainder of the soft rock erodes away, leav­ing behind the harder substance that takes a web-like shape.

Wind Cave has multiple different levels, and during this tour, we were able to see all of them. Water has extremely high erosive properties, and once we got to places where water did not have enough time to work on breaking down the rock, the cave was much smoother and had no boxwork.

We eventually made it to a resting point where the ranger told us about the history of the cave, and how the cave was originally used for mining, but was later converted into a tourist hotspot. While we were all safely seated, the ranger turned off the already-dim lights to demonstrate just how dark it is un­der­ground in a cave. She told us to hold our hand directly in front of our faces, which we obviously couldn’t see—there was literally no light, which meant that our eyes would never “adjust” to the darkness.

This area also had some nice frostwork. I tried to take a photo of it, and I captured a lot of cave popcorn, but I didn’t realize that the bulk of the frostwork was out-of-frame (except for a few growths at the far bottom). Again, keep in mind that everything was extremely dim, it was very difficult for me to see (considering I already have horrible eyesight and horrible night vision), and these photos are heavily enhanced in post-production.

As our time together came to an end, we started heading back to the elevator to return to the surface. On the way back, I snapped a bunch more pho­to­graphs of everything interesting around me, including nice rock formations and a lot more boxwork.

Exploring Wind Cave was a great experience. As if I wasn’t already aware enough, seeing things like this reminds me just how vast and complex the world is, and gives me a reality check of how unimaginably tiny my life is compared to the scale of everything else happening. It also acted as a reminder not to get complacent about my safety and the fragility of life—nature doesn’t hold your hand and help you survive like modern-day civilization does, and it’s very easy to stumble into an unfortunate situation that kills you.

 
On my way from Wind Cave National Park to Rapid City, Google Maps decided to route me through 7-11 Road because it was the fastest way to my des­ti­nation, without informing me that it was a dirt road. I was fine with it, though; my truck handled it just as well as a regular road, and I made a new friend along the way.

After my stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, my next destination was planned to be Rapid City, South Dakota. The drive is around four and a half hours, which isn’t that bad—that’s about the time it would take me to drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles if there was normal traffic conditions after entering the Los Angeles area—but I still wanted to see if there were any opportunities to split up that drive across two days.

Upon searching for available hotels along the route, I noticed that there was a Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriott in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the Scotts Bluff National Monument was also nearby west of Gering, a city in Scotts Bluff County. I decided to spend one night in Scottsbluff, then scheduled a stop at the Scotts Bluff National Monument on the day I drive in, and another stop at another nearby national park on the day I drive out.

Just as a quick disclaimer, I want to point out that I am not making any typos when it comes to these location names. The national monument and the county are called Scotts Bluff with a space between the two syllables, while the city name is Scottsbluff as a single word. Funny enough, Google Maps also has a point where, driving from the national monument to the city, you would take Old Oregon Trail, turn onto Nebraska Highway 92, and follow signs for “Scottebluff” … but I think that might just be an error on Google Maps, as I wasn’t able to locate any signs that replace Scottsbluff’s “s” with an “e.”

Scotts Bluff National Monument was a fairly small and straightforward national monument. Admission was free, and upon entering, you had two op­tions for exploration: you could either park at the bottom and hike your way up to the top, or you could take the Scotts Bluff Summit Road via ve­hi­cle. I decided to do both.

Because of the shape of the National Monument, the hiking route started as a paved trail that stretched far outwards to the northeast, cutting through Scotts Spring.

Around that area, I was able to find some wildflowers, though they weren’t exactly the kind of flowers you’d see elsewhere, and I also wasn’t exactly sure whether or not they were still alive.

For a bulk of the first part of the hike, I thought the trail was relatively timid, but after making it more than halfway to the summit and looking back, I realized that the path was actually somewhat carved in the side of the mountain, and the drop off the edge was a lot steeper than it felt when I was walk­ing through that area.

Eventually, I made it to a tunnel that cut through the rock and opened a pathway to the other side of the mountain.

The other side of the tunnel had a lot more vegetation and opened up views to the northern side of the mountain, which were previously hidden by the mountain itself.

After some hairpin turns and a few steeper climbs, I made it to the North Overlook at the summit and was able to enjoy nice, sweeping views to the north, specifically of Scottsbluff, Terrytown, and the North Platte River.

On my way back down the trail, I decided to snap a photo of the tunnel through the mountain. At the time of the photograph, it was so bright outside and so dark in the tunnel that it just looked pitch black in the tunnel, but I was able to extract a lot from the raw sensor data from my camera. There were three tunnels in the vehicular route to the top as well, but this hiker tunnel had a lot more interesting detail to the texture of the rock.

On my way down, I also snapped a photo of a rocky ridge that had signs instructing people to stay on the trail and avoid going off course (i.e., on the ridge) due to high risk of falling. I’m not particularly the biggest fan of randomly falling off a mountain and dying, so I heeded that warning.

After making it back down to the vis­i­tor center, I got in my truck and took the scenic drive back up to the top of the monument so I could see the three other tunnels and the South Overlook as well. I could’ve just walked from the North Overlook to the South Overlook as part of my hike, but I saved the South Overlook for my drive so I could use it as a “reward.” The South Overlook had some nice mountain views, as well as a view of the vis­i­tor cen­ter and the first loop of Scotts Bluff Summit Road leading into the first vehicular tunnel.

The walk from the parking lot to the South Overlook wasn’t recorded on my GPS, and I also started tracking a little bit late, but overall, my total hiking distance was a little bit over three and a half miles.

I’m glad I stopped by Scotts Bluff National Monument. It obviously isn’t exactly the most impressive or stunning national monument or national park I’ve ever been to, but it has its own charm with its relatively small size. As a tourist, you’d be able to see everything there is to see in one single visit of a few hours, but with free admission, I feel like this national monument is more used as a regular exercise area for the residents of Scotts Bluff County, being only about a ten minute drive from central Gering.

I wanted to get in a hike in Cheyenne before heading out for my next destination, but I noticed that a lot of trails near the city were just greenways that connected different neighborhoods. After expanding my search radius, I came across Curt Gowdy State Park, a state park about half an hour west of the main city of Cheyenne.

I was anticipating doing a quick hike out to and back from Hidden Falls, but long story short, the quick hike ended up on the not-so-quick side.

I successfully found my way to the parking lot and the trailhead. Unfortunately, although the trails were actually pretty well-marked for off-road vehicles, they were almost not marked at all for foot hikers. Because of this, I just found a trail and started walking, and it ended up being in the wrong direction.

After occasionally taking a peek at my GPS (which was difficult, because there was extremely poor signal out there), there came a point where I realized that my trajectory was way too far off from Hidden Falls, so I retraced my steps and found a different path I could take. That path also ended up being in­correct; I made it much closer to Hidden Falls, but it took me to the foot of a mountain and Middle Crow Creek, and it wasn’t very realistic for me to attempt to cross the creek into forest and try to climb straight up a mountain without realizing where it would take me.

Eventually, I found my way onto the correct path, and after already having hiked about halfway or so down the trail, I saw a sign that said “To Hidden Falls,” even though this was now a straight shot to Hidden Falls and there was no possible way I could miss it.

Maybe if the person who nailed this sign to the tree was using both halves of their brain on that day, they may have come to the conclusion that the sign would have probably been far more useful and effective at the initial three-way fork in the road.

Once I got closer to Hidden Falls, the trail got much better. There were bridges in areas that were difficult to navigate, and even though there was a lot of snow and ice covering the path, there were enough footsteps in the snow from previous hikers trafficking the route that it was easy to see where to go next.

Eventually, I made it to Hidden Falls and realized that the waterfall was completely frozen over.

I’m actually fortunate that I wasted about an hour and a half roaming around in the wrong area, because that made it so the timing lined up where I met some ice fishermen at the waterfall. If I remember correctly, their names are Angel and Alex, and the guy pictured below goes by “Everyday Pikachu Hat Fisherman” on YouTube. Apparently the ice was extremely deep, and they actually had some success catching fish.

After enjoying the view, carefully sliding around so I wouldn’t get a concussion from slipping on the ice, and then making it back to the parking lot, I drove back onto Granite Springs Road and took a detour into the Happy Jack Camp­ground and shot a nice view of the Granite Springs Reservoir.

I’d say that, even though the hike ended up about twice as long as I was anticipating due to my poor navigation, it was ultimately a success. The scenery was great, the air was fresh, and the frozen waterfall was very intriguing. I also enjoyed meeting the ice fishermen and watching them fish—I’ve seen pho­tos and videos of people ice fishing online, but I never expected to be able to see it in-person, especially without having to go to somewhere like A­las­ka.