The Badlands

Sometimes, in the rougher stretches of life, the exact right thing to do can be setting yourself an arbitrary, foolish, and daunting task. Times for me were not good in the weeks leading up to the recent road trip out west. When one of my friends insisted we should make the Badlands a stop on our trip, I thought I had found a task to seize upon.

I knew roughly what time we’d be leaving Chicago, and according to Google Maps it was a twelve hour drive. If we didn’t stop for the night but drove straight through, it would put us there in time for the golden hour. I was travelling with two friends on this trip, and floated this idea to them. They were on board. The mood in the car was upbeat; it was the start of a week together and we were all catching up and in high spirits. By midnight, it was the zen of long car trips: intermittent conversation between grooving to music. Around two o’clock, with my friends dozing off, I pulled long sips of an energy drink and kept the window cracked open to keep myself awake. A second wind took hold once the time remaining to the park started to appear quite manageable. Because once you’ve driven ten hours, what’s another two? The sky behind us was beginning to pale, and, by the time we’d gone through the unmanned national park checkpoint, a ruddy glow on the horizon meant that dawn was close. We had literally just finished setting up tripods when the sun broke across the horizon.

The Badlands are a national park whose main features are fantastically eroded stone landscapes. And for the most part, visitors have the run of the place. Though there are designated paths and even raised boardwalks in some areas, visitors have relatively free reign. At the end of one path, only a sign warning of the the rough terrain and the dangers of dehydration were the only discouragement from descending into the maze of canyons below. We shot there for several hours, high on adrenaline and the beauty of the place but also increasingly loopy from lack of sleep. This was a small, though much needed victory, a delirious immersion into a time and place of stunning natural wonder.

I can only hope the photos do justice to the lived experience. They’re presented in chronological order, from that moment of sunrise into late morning.

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Thanks for visiting. Coming soon: more from the great American West.