The Badlands are only half the picture. The upper prairie is mixed-grass country, the meeting ground of tallgrass and shortgrass, and home to pronghorn, whose closest relative is the giraffe. Bison range mainly in the park's western end, and a 2019 fence project brought their range up to the highway.
Roughly half of this place is rock. The other half is grass, and you're on top of it now. It's mixed-grass prairie, the seam between the tall grass of the wet east and the short grass of the dry west. Sitting in between gives it more plant species than any other kind of prairie. Bison came back to these grasslands in nineteen sixty-three. For decades hardly anyone saw one, because their range was so remote. That changed in twenty nineteen. Forty-three miles of new fence and three cattle guards opened twenty-two thousand more acres. Four bulls walked out onto ground no bison had used since the eighteen seventies. Each fall the bison that aren't kept here go out to other lands. Some go to the Intertribal Buffalo Council, a coalition of tribes keeping traditional buffalo practices alive. Give the herd a hundred feet, and stop only in marked pullouts. Out on the open grass, watch for pronghorn. They can hold fifty-five miles an hour for half a mile, and nothing out here comes close. That speed was probably built to escape the American cheetah. That cat's been gone about twelve thousand years, and nobody's told the pronghorn.
Photo: National Park Service, no photographer named, public domain · Public domain