This
backpacking trip was prompted by a discovery made on my prior trip to the
Badlands. In April 1990 I’d spent a weekend in the Badlands with Craig and
Stacey. On Saturday we’d hiked the Castle Trail, which was now familiar to us.
On Sunday we did some exploring, first going through a magnificent area where
we found abundant fossils. Later in the day we stopped at Pinnacle, the
overlook where the park road meets the Badlands Wall, and that serves as the
introduction to the park for most visitors. Pinnacle has a sheer drop down the wall
to the basin below. But it is composed of several slump blocks, each capped
with trees that are able to tap groundwater collected in the open spaces of the
broken ground in the slump.
On the Castle Trail, BNP.
On
the earlier trip Craig was able to find a route down to the trees from the
overlook. The route began at the very east end of the parking lot, just past
the introduction sign for the park (these landmarks may have changed with
improvements to the overlook over the last 30 years). The gully was steep,
narrow, and filled with trash from the overlook. The route involved a tricky exit
from the gulley, a traverse down a steep slope of gumbo, and a finish through
junipers atop one of the slump blocks.
Fossil hunting in the Badlands.
I
was confident that I could follow Craig’s route again and wanted to explore
more in the rugged terrain below the overlook. I originally recruited several
hikers for the trip, but only Don and I were able to make it. This would be
Don’s first backpacking trip.
We
selected the correct gully at the top and thrashed our way toward the junipers.
There were a few tricky jumps in the gulley, but eventually we reached the
junipers on the west end, and worked our way to the base of the wall. I was sketching
our route on a field sheet, so am still able to roughly follow our route for
the trip. We both were taking pictures. Don had just gotten a new camera.
Descending the gully from Pinnacles Overlook.
At
the bottom of the wall, we took a break beside a sod table and were surprised
to realize that we were only about a ¼ mile from the overlook. The overlook
would remain in view, our reference point all day long. 
Below Pinnacles Overlook.
We
set up a base camp in a juniper grove with a small wall on its other side. Coincidently,
we were not far from where I’d camped with Nitro on our Thanksgiving backpacking
trip in 1988. We headed upstream (east) to look for the area where I’d spotted
bighorn sheep on the ’88 trip. On a whim we hiked up a side gulley to the south
and ended up at the west end of Deer Haven, surprising us both.
The Badlands Wall near Deer Haven.
We
then hiked further east across the base of Deer Haven. We were able to get to
its east end where we were blocked by a prominent gulley, maybe the same one
from 1988. We then looped south, then west gradually circling the head of the
bowl, and exploring some great side gullies. One of the gullies was
overhanging, so we had to slide through holding ourselves at a 60 degree angle.
Much like the red rock canyon country of the southwest, the real action here is
in the side canyons.
Exploring near Deer Haven.
Eventually
we worked our way back to our initial overlook above Deer Haven. We decided to
head back to camp by staying on the ridge that had been south of our camp. Soon
we found two coats stashed under rocks on a small knob. The coats looked dry
and therefore recently placed. Then we found some fresh tracks. Soon we found
Loren Chapman (from Minnesota) and his son. He told us that he had been hiking
in the Badlands since 1957, and had never seen another party. They had started
at the farm below Deer Haven. This was also the only time I ever saw
another person off trail in the Badlands.
As
it turned out the drainage we were following didn’t intersect the one we were
camped by, and it took a long detour to reach camp. We weren’t sure we had
turned at the correct drainage, and started getting nervous about being lost in
the jumbled terrain. Part of the “Bad” in Badlands is that the topography makes
no sense at all, and is insanely complex. But luckily we found camp by 5PM, and
even spotted two bison along the way.
We’d
had a great time exploring the gullies, and had some extra time to enjoy the
clear calm evening. Don had found a stone scrapper, ¼ of a fossil jawbone, and
a six point deer antler, which he found useful as a climbing tool. At nearly
every turn we found something interesting. I relished the uncertainty of every
turn. Would a gully go to the top? Can you cross that plateau without being
blocked by an unseen cliff? Poking your way into the remote corners of such a
wild and untraveled place is what wilderness is all about. In the Badlands so
much is compressed into a small area. We were likely never more than two miles
from the overlook all day.
I
slept out of the tent to enjoy the view, and ended up curled down in my
sleeping bag all night. My stove was working this time, so I enjoyed hot
meals. The next morning before leaving camp we explored a north side gully near
camp. We climbed one steep divide ridge, but did not find the type of
overhanging meanders that we’d seen the prior day.
Much
of the floor of our basin was at the contact between the Chadron and Brule
formations. Once we climbed out of the main drainage we were walking along this
floor. It is strewn with silicified cobbles, haystacks, and sharp ridges of
Brule gumbo. We found a few fossils, possibly discarded by other visitors, then
dropped our packs to look for more. The extra fossil hunting wasn’t productive,
but we found some steep gumbo slopes to scree/ski/slide down.
Sliding down a bentonite slope.
We
planned to exit the basin west of the Pinnacles, but we strayed far enough east
to recognize our entrance drainage. The sure route back was too good to pass
up. We climbed to the slump block, and found it best to stay close to the cliff
edge to avoid bashing through the trees. Eventually, we found a place to climb
up to the road level, just below the east side of Pinnacles Overlook. I could
get all the way up without my back, but there was a 6-foot high wall that we
couldn’t climb with packs.
We
ended up using a rope to haul our packs across the steep gully that marked the
east end of the slump block. Going uphill the jump across the gully is much
harder. The climb was rough, but made worse by an audience of tourists at the
overlook.
Sage Creek Basin.
Driving
home we went via the Sage Creek Campground and through the town of Scenic to
scout the west end of the Badlands Wall. We spotted bighorn sheep 75 yards from
the road, but did not see any bison. We determined that once west of the
Pinnacles, one could descend to the Sage Creek Basin almost anywhere down the
wall. Prime areas for other visits looked like just east of Sage Creek Pass and
the areas from Antler Butte east to the Pinnacles.
Badlands NP, Pinnacles BP.
I
would do one more round of off trail Badlands hiking before moving away. The
next March I spent parts of two days exploring the rugged badlands just east of
the Door Trail in the developed area of the park. I have notes, but no map, of
those trips. This was another concentration of steep gullies to challenge my
scrambling skills. I was able to hike east out to Rake Creek and back and found
the markers a search and rescue group
had used to keep track of the gullies that they had checked on a recent mission.
