So it's currently 7:55 pm on day two, still in Wall, SD outside of Badlands, and I am already ready to pack it the fuck in for the night. I am BEAT. It was such a long day, but such a great long day. We'll start with the obvious:
Badlands? Incredible. I don't believe in god or gods or a clever watchmaker or any nonsense that involves some almighty force creating things (because I DO believe in all other manner of nonsense, just not theistic nonsense), but it's almost easier to be like, WOW whoever made this did an incredible job! Because THAT is somehow easier to contextualize than the big bang leading to all of the amazing landscapes I saw today. How do you even get that through your head?? It's so hard while I'm sitting here in this hotel room, but it is actually pretty natural to think about how incredibly small and lucky I am to exist in a place and way where I can know the feeling of the air on my skin as I watch the sunrise over Pinnacles overlook.
So let's go through the day, because I took a photo every 4.7 seconds. I've been uploading photos for the last hour and I might just have to let daily blogging defeat me, as it always does. I tried my hardest, I really fucking did, but I am just too fucking tired.
It is now October 4th, and I am sitting UNhappily in our hostel in Hatchet, WY. Somewhere a little voice in my head said, you've never stayed at a hostel before! This is traveling like a European! Give it a try! But I have been in this hostel for two hours and I think that is try enough. I am over it, and we have three nights here before we're back in the safe, loving embrace of budget hotels through Wyndham Rewards.
Let's catch up.
We woke up at 5am to get our gear packed up for sunrise. It is miserable getting up that early for a chance at maybe no photos turning out (Present Drea is bitter about none of her photos turning out), but that doesn't stop us from getting up and getting going before anybody decent is awake.
The essentials. Part of a balanced breakfast.
We drove the fifteen minutes to Pinnacles overlook and set up shop right as light started cresting, and even if I didn't get any photos that are printable, just being there was absolutely amazing.
Look. At. That.
Derek and I had very different ideas about where we wanted to post up to take our photos, so he went his way and I went mine. I realized pretty early on that this location in general was not where I wanted to be, so I packed my gear up and just ran around enjoying the pinnacles, climbing all over them and generally being a delighted menace.
Those leggings are fleece lined. Very warm, very unnecessary for this outing.
Cell phones automatically HDR your images, which is why I like to use my cell to document everywhere we go. I just like to feel bad about my manual camera that I spent literally thousands of dollars to create my ideal kit, and my little Samsung S21 does it more efficiently.
To spoil the ending, none of my photos look this tonally cohesive. I ran around for about thirty minutes while Derek remained on task, taking photos of all manner of lands that are quite good, actually.
My partner in crime!
I did notice that there were far more interesting rocks and shapes out in the distance, so I sat with Derek for a bit and tried to take some pictures of those. I mean, I DID take pictures of those, they just aren't very good. After Derek felt satisfied with his attempts at sunrise photos, we got into the car and headed through the scenic loop. Which was quite scenic, in case you were wondering. Like, the first little pull out after pinnacles was so pretty.
My beautiful Peenalope!
Once the sun fully crested into the little valley pull off we were sitting in, you could see all of the tremendous colors in the rocks.
Derek wanted to grab pictures of yellow mounds, so he went his way, I went mine, and I wish I hadn't looked at the rocks, because so many of them were rocks I wanted to pocket. But you are very unallowed to remove rocks from national parks, so unfortunately I had to leave them all where I found them. I found a little pinnacle, climbed onto it, and pouted about not being able to take rocks.
I was boiling to death in those fleece leggings.
Derek and I drove through to praire dog town (the real name of that section of the park!!) and on the way back to the car, I found a bit of plastic that I couldn't quite reach, so Derek made the valiant effort to swing himself down and get it. Which he did.
My hero!
There was just so much to see. Thankfully, there is a very helpful loop so it's next to impossible to get lost, but Badlands does have a "walk wherever you want" policy, so like, getting lost isn't impossible. It's just next to it.
Hm. I thought it was one word? SUSPICIOUS.
I was pretty bad about taking pictures of each lookout that we went to. They sort of blurred together, if I'm being honest. Not in a bad way, in a "this is all so beautiful, does distinction really matter" and also "I've been up since 5am and I'm tired" kind of way.
I did make a little friend, though!
When you're driving through the canyon, the only thing you can do is oooh and aaah and punctuate the silences in between with a lot of breathless "fuck"s. Badlands is absolutely stunning.
Here's where the day started to run off the rails a little. And like, it's fine, really. It didn't run so off the rails that we ended up having a bad day. But it did derail my best laid mouse plans for men or something. We got to...um...this place:
...which is where Door, Window, and Notch trail are on one side, and...uh...I think Castle and Fossile are on the other. I had been desperate to do Notch trail, so when we got here, I wanted to hop to it before the day got too unbearable in my fleece lined pants. And it turns out, Notch tral is closed. C-L-O-S-E-D closed. To me, to everyone. And I was so sad that I cried about it. Did I mention I was super late for my period so I was deeply and without reason emotional? I cried about the trail being closed. And it was the fifth time that morning I had cried.
No trails for you, stupid!
We checked everything out and decided we would head back to our hotel so I could change, because I was sweltering in the fleece leggings, go to Wall Drug, and then come back to do Door or Window before sunset. We took a little saunter up to see what the beginning of the trail was like:
And then a stranger, for scale:
And then we turned around because I knew if I kept exploring we would just do the entire trail and I would have a heat episode (I had one later in the day, anyway), so we walked back, said a fond farewell...
...and then we never came back to do the trails. Not a one trail in Badlands was explored by us.
And it's only been 4 hours into the day. We headed over to the visitor's center to find our passport books, and instead found that they were closed for inventory. Drat!!! No passport book! Denied!
But do you know what they DID have?
A MOTHER FUCKIN' FOSSIL LAB. An active fossil lab. Where you can see real fossils! And we did! As I sit here in my shitty little hostel, I am wondering if I upload all of the photos I took of the fossil lab (I took 60 images in there), if I just upload my favorites, or if you just take my word for it that the fossil lab is incredibly cool, and seeing a real archaelogist working on the excavation of some sort of rodent hippopotamus was really, really cool. I think I'll do the latter, because I did take far more photos than I should have.
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I'll give you this one. An oreodont. He was working on an oreodont. Which maybe wasn't a rodent hippopotamus, but it was kinda close.
We didn't get our passport books, but we did stamp the little pieces of paper to put in our books later. The books would become an entire ordeal, but here are our stamps:
These have come to bring me an untold amount of joy.
We finished out the loop and got out to take a little peek and see if we were at all inspired for sunrise photos.
Tempting, but no.
We got back in the car to drive back to the hotel with a little stop off at Wall Drug, and on the way out of the park was the world's biggest prairie dog.
Eat your heart out, my dad!
It was a little...uh...prairie dog ranch zoo sort of situation? You couldn't pet them, but you COULD go buy prairie dog food and feed them. I imagined little pellets like the sort of things you throw at koi fish in ponds, and I was vaguely disappointed that it was just bags of peanuts. But in the store where you buy the prairie dog food, you can also buy little trinkets, some of which were rocks, and while I was looking at rocks, the clerk pulled out his big, expensive Fairburn agates and while I thought they were overpriced, I DID ask where we could legally go grab some of our own. Derek wandered over and we both listened to the directions on how to get to the best rockhounding location for fairburn and prairie agates, and we changed our whole day around in order to go do that. We ran back to the car, headed to Wall so I could stop into Wall Drug for the quickest visit ever, and then we would go rockhound to be back at Pinnacles for sunset.
Approximately nothing of that sort happened in that fashion.
We got to Wall Drug, where I thought I could spend a quick 5 minutes grabbing a photo or two for the blog. That was an incorrect assumption. First of all, Wall Drug isn't a building, it's like an entire town. This strange little tchotchke town that is all facade and cheap delusion, but with the strangest kind of touristy charm that you have to witness to understand. It was cloying and white washed and gross, but I also have such a curiosity about places like this, because it reminds me of what white Americans think America is. This strange, idealized, brave western dream of adventure and grit and love of country, even though it's all fake and none of that is what really lies beneath. It's the truest look at the veil over our eyes, and I think there's definitely something to gawk at there.
And boy did I ever gawk. I could have gawked for ages longer, had we not been under a time constraint.
A deeply unserious place.
Before Derek and I even got out of the car, I was utterly delighted by this young femme walking down the sidewalk. They had on black everything, and TOUGH black. Don't fuck with me black. But like, in the emo punk will-fold-under-the-slightest-pressure fashion. Very 90s mall goth. Fishnets, safety pins, chains, cropped top, pixie cut. Dour look on their face. I watched them as they walked toward a little patch of flowers, stoop down to smell them, and then they took a photo and kept slumping their way through Wall Drug's circus of whatever the fuck it is. That person made my day.
Here are all of the photos I took at Wall Drug, and you get no explanation because this place is an assault to the senses AND the sensibilities.
They even have a fucking chapel:
Even Vegas thinks this is gauche.
That was enough of that, even though there really is a ton of stuff to see in there. Most of it is egregiously tasteless, but I do love nothing more than to ogle white american hubris.
We rushed back to the hotel to change, and decided to fill up the tank before leaving. Derek got so excited about making our sunset location that he just...drove off with the gas nozzle still in the tank.
I have never ever ever seen that in real life, which is impressive for a latchkey kid that lived at gas stations though her formative years. Derek was so embarrassed, but everybody at the gas station was so nice about it (except for the gas station clerk. They charged us 80 dollars). A young man came up to me as I went to take a photo of Derek's oopsie and said, "I have totally done that, too" and I was like, girl I have never seen that happen in person. He laughed like he felt sorry for me, so I really had to stifle the urge to yell DON'T LOOK AT ME THAT WAY MY HUSBAND DID IT, YOU TWO ARE THE IDIOTS! I didn't, though. Derek was stopped by a much older lady who shared with him the time she did the exact same thing in Winnipeg, and she turned the whole gas pump askew because it was before quick disconnects at gas stations. And as we drove away I thought to myself, what are the chances that the only three real people who have ever done that before to my knowledge are all in the exact same place at once? Big planet, small world, I guess.
Congratulations, honey, you did it!
We should have asked to keep the gas pump for 80 fucking dollars, honestly. It's an absurd price to charge, they just pop it back on and it's made to disconnect for a reason. But off we went, back to Badlands for sunset.
We stopped at Yellow Mounds proper:
Which is very yellow, and very mound-y. Excellent naming schema at Badlands, no notes. On the way back to Pinnacles, we saw a turkey that we had seen earlier that day, and this turkey had made us curious enough about its behavior to have Derek wonder aloud, "Is that turkey that guy's pet?". The turkey in question had been VERY close to a man unloading his car, and we were perplexed at the closeness. So when we saw the turkey at the same parking lot harranguing a different vehicle, we had to see what the turkey's deal was.
Turns out it's just annoying, possibly longing for a companion. There is a video of me sounding very threatened by this turkey where I shout at it, "I'm a vegan!" as if that would stop a turkey uprising. We had to wait for another car to shuffle her off to, like It Follows.
Derek wanted to shoot pictures at Pinnacles again, but I didn't. I knew there were better locations to shoot. So I dropped him off and headed back the other way until I found a place that caught my eye.
This will do nicely.
The only thing that sucks about being alone in a national park is being alone in a national park. I wasn't all that bothered by the idea of being murdered, but for someone unbothered by that, I sure texted every single person I know about my impending death at the hands of a serial killer.
The hairy legs of the soon to be murdered.
I did not get murdered, but I did get bored and impatient with the way sunset was shaking out. I kept messaging Derek that I was sure this was going to be a dud of a sunrise for photos, and after about an hour of sitting alone, I packed it all in and headed back to Derek.
Sunset did get good, though.
Look at that light! I was on the wrong side of the rocks for it, so I'm glad I left where I had been posted up.
The sexiest gas pump murderer this side of the Mississippi
And the colors only got more intense after that. I took a few, but my heart wasn't really in it, because there wasn't much to make it interesting. Don't get me wrong, the colors are enough to be interesting, but anybody who takes landscape photos will know what I mean.
We stayed until the sun had completely disappeared beneath the horizon, and then we headed back to the hotel. Not before saying goodbye to a parking lot friend:
And that was a wrap on that day. The drive to Yellowstone is next, which was fairly exciting, as long travel days go.
Because I am writing this several days in the future, with several days under my belt, I do not know how long it will be before I get all of these written up. I suspect it will take a long time, because our days are packed, I take lots of editorial photos on my cell phone to upload, and I have to stitch the days back together and that is hard on my little AuDHD brain. Anyway. Next stop, Yellowstone!
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