Bad Weather in the Badlands

Time for another Road Trip!!  Bruce and I headed out cross country.  We're going to visit cousins or friends or family or some other such nonsense and see some of the sights along the way.  We left in the middle of May.  Summer's almost here.  So, we take the heavy coats and cold weather stuff out of the GeezerMobile in favor of light jackets and warm weather stuff.  Sounds reasonable, right?  Wrooooong!!  There's still snow on the ground over Snoqualmie Pass!  Granted, it wasn't as much as in the winter, but still - unlike Rainier, there's no glacier in this part of the Cascades, and these aren't snow-capped mountains!  Chalking it up to it just being altitude, we drove on.  Once we got out of the mountains, the snow had melted and it had started raining, but it was still very cold.  Our light jackets just weren't cutting it, but the GeezerMobile has a good heater, so as long as we stayed in the car, we were fine.

We took enough food that we shouldn't need to eat out at the beginning of the trip, and we planned to do picnics along the way in parks and scenic rest areas with after-meal walks along paths, but no!  We ran out to use the bathroom and ate in the car.  We still picked scenic spots, but we just enjoyed them through the windows.  IT WAS FLIPPING COLD!

The scenery was beautiful, but I already have pictures of it and I've posted them before.  And did I mention that it was flipping cold?  Cold enough that I didn't want to roll the windows down or get out of the car to take pictures.  Until we hit Wyoming.  As we were pointing out the little white dots on the hillsides (once Bruce let me know those were probably antelope laying down), I was reminiscing on the only wild antelope I had ever seen (on our first trip, heading west through Wyoming) and how they had run the minute we stopped.  At that time, all I got was a picture of the dust they kicked up while running away and their slower buddy.

Here, there was a small herd, and they didn't seem concerned about the car pulling off the interstate.  They even waited and watched while I took out the camera, changed the battery to one that hadn't been sitting in an idle camera for the past two days, and got the lens cap off.  By then, half of the herd decided they had waited enough and started walking away.

Two of them chose to hang around for the rest of the photo shoot, each of them showing just how interested they were in us.

There were no more wild animals out on the way to Wall, South Dakota, so there was no compelling reason to roll down my window and let the cold come in.  When we got to Wall, however, we turned south to drive through Badlands National Park.  The plan was to spend the afternoon there and maybe the next day.  There was a cold rain falling, so we only got out of the car once or twice, caking our shoes with mud and finally deciding to just view the pretty scenery and animals from the comfort of the car.  We'll just have to come back to experience it without the rainy haze.  It was beautiful scenery even in the rain.

This was our first view after walking through the mud (and learning better than to get out of the car).

Soon after getting back in the car and driving down the dirt road, the car in front of us stopped in the middle of the road.  I couldn't tell what they were doing, but I started looking around to see if I could see something.  All I saw was a couple of big rocks, so we went around them and continued on our way.  About a mile down the road, we saw a group of bison hanging out in the distance.  Just laying down, looking like a bunch of big rocks - until the camera was zoomed in on them.

Made me think I may have misjudged those other two rocks.  We headed on down to Roberts' Prairie Dog Town, where most of the dogs must have been in a meeting.  The did leave one or two out to keep an eye out for intruders or maybe direct any late arrivals to the meeting hall.


Turning around and heading to the paved portion of the park, we stopped to check out those two big rocks from earlier.  Turns out this

looked like this with the zoom.  So, "big rocks" is a thing now, apparently.

Turning onto the paved road, we found several herds of bighorn sheep.

Some were laying down.  Some were grazing.  Some were laying down and grazing.

Some were climbing the canyon walls and some were crossing the road.




The Badlands are beautiful with loads of animals and awesome formations.  We enjoyed the afternoon driving through the park, and I rolled the window down frequently, even though - did I mention how frigging cold it was?  For this rest of this post, I'll just drop some pictures for you to enjoy in the warmth.

We spent the night close by in hopes of coming back the next day.