Badlands News

The stunning panorama of Badlands National Park rests just an hour east of Rapid City, South Dakota.This 244,000-acre landscape is both barren and beautiful. Wind and rain erosion have created an eerie moonscape of deep gorges and jagged sawtooth ridges with rock layers painted in subtle hues of sand, rose, gold and green. 

Paige Baker, superintendent at Badlands National Park, announced he is retiring from the National Park Service at the end of the year. Baker has served at the park for five years. While at the park, he North Dakota-native was instrumental in developing the South Unit General Management Plan, organized a Friends Group for Badlands National Park, promoted and built relationships with the neighbors and partners, and directed the Common Ground Project for high school students, according to a news release from the NPS.

National Park is getting money from the federal stimulus measure to improve the main road through the park in western South Dakota.Park officials report that they are receiving $11.2 million to rehabilitate Loop Road 240. The work will start now and is expected to be completed in November 2010.The project will include replacing culverts, improving drainage and repaving parts of the road. Officials say traffic delays are expected throughout the construction period.

Sylvatric plague has been found in a colony of prairie dogs in Badlands National Park, and officials will continue a program began last year to dust colonies with insecticide to halt the spread of the disease.

"Art is nothing as to nature," Bernard Pomerance wrote in his play, "The Elephant Man." A dozen years since I last saw it -- a dark, circuslike production at the Theatre Building on Belmont Avenue -- but the line must have tucked itself away in a fold in the brain, because it came back as we stood on soft, cracked, dove-gray dry mud and swept our eyes across this marvelous moonscape of buttes, ravines and canyon walls.

In 1985, 47 elk were released in the southern section of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. Today, that herd numbers some 900 animals, far more than the park can sustain. The herd needs to be reduced to about 300 in order to bring it into balance with its ecosystem. What to do?

Ted Hustead's family knows a thing or two about running a tourist attraction during tough economic times.Consider Wall Drug, on the north edge of South Dakota's Badlands.Hustead's grandparents, Ted and Dorothy Hustead, bought the store in this small town in 1931 -- during the Great Depression.

    On your next visit to Badlands expect to see plenty of lambs around the park. Badlands National Park has already had eleven lambs born this year. These lambs have been born to bighorn sheep that were moved from Taos, New Mexico in 2004. Biologists believe that there will be more throughout the coming months. The bighorn sheep, which was once exterminated from the park, has been reintroduce and is increasing in population with each passing year.

Crews doused a brush fire near Badlands National Park Sunday after it charred an estimated 500 acres about five miles east of Scenic. It started in the north ditch along Highway 44 and spread quickly to the northeast across private rangeland that's adjacent to Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

Crews doused a brush fire near Badlands National Park Sunday after it charred an estimated 500 acres about five miles east of Scenic.It started in the north ditch along Highway 44 and spread quickly to the northeast across private rangeland that's adjacent to Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

Badlands National Park is one of 15 parks in the Midwest Region of the National Park Service that has been rated green, the highest mark a park can get on the Environmental Management System Scorecard, superintendent Paige Baker said. 

Marcia McMacken stepped off the boardwalk and took a long look at the sweeping scene around her -- bright green meadows in front, craggy tan peaks and deep forbidding canyons behind. She was clearly enamored.

Marcia McMacken stepped off the boardwalk and took a long look at the sweeping scene around her — bright green meadows in front, craggy tan peaks and deep forbidding canyons behind. She was clearly enamored.

CUSTER STATE PARK, South Dakota - The wild burro wouldn't take no for an answer. We had already encountered grazing pronghorn antelope, packs of wild turkeys, prairie dogs, and enough bison to render us downright blase when yet another of the enormous beasts emerged on our four-day trip through the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The southern half of this swath of grasslands and chiseled pink spires looks untouched from a distance. Closer up, the scars of history are easy to see.