Day 4 Part 2 - The Badlands

After we left 1880 town, we headed to the Badlands in South Dakota.  Boy were we surprised by the beauty of this place.  It has been one of the highlights of the trip.  Badlands are rugged, heavily-eroded tracts of sedimentary layers often produced in semi-arid climates (that's your history lesson for the day). 

 Well that's comforting.  As soon as we saw this sign, Katie started freaking out, a lot.  I have to admit, I was freaking out a bit too.  

Off on our first hike!

This was not easy.  Coming down was even harder.

After we climbed up, there was another section that went really high on narrow paths.  I opted to stay behind with Jack and Katie while John, Grace and Sam moved on. 

They actually took the tri-pod with them to get this photo at the top.

Of course we had to hit the gift shop and they had to try on all of the hats.

And finally the beautiful sunset.

We stuck around for the Nightime show but unfortunately due to the cloud cover, they didn't bring out the telescopes.  During the ranger's talk, she said the average amount of time people spend in the Badlands is 45 minutes.  We were shocked.  We spent an entire afternoon and part of the next morning and still wished we had more time.  I highly recommend visitng this wondrous place if you ever get the chance.