Badlands National Park: The Loop Road

The tour starts at the Exit 131 interchange, on the open prairie north of the Badlands. Ranger Quinn and Ranger Boone Merrick ride along on Highway 240 as it crosses the park to Wall, with the sights, the science and…

Cactus Flat is the plain where the Exit 131 traffic meets Highway 240, with fuel at the Conoco and the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site visitor center across the interstate. From here it is open prairie to the…

Highway 240 runs south across open grass toward the Northeast Entrance. The road is older than the monument it serves: South Dakota had to build it before federal protection could take effect, and ranch and school tra…

The Northeast Entrance has long been the most used of the park's three staffed stations. Booths take credit or debit only, and visitors receive a park map and brochure on entry. The first overlook comes up almost at o…

Big Badlands Overlook sits just inside the Northeast Entrance and gives most westbound visitors their first look over the edge. It faces the eastern part of the Badlands Wall, the long erosional line that runs from ne…

West of the entrance the highway follows the line where unbroken prairie meets bare, gullied rock. This is the Badlands Wall, which divides the upper grasslands from the lower ones. Swelling clay and summer storms kee…

The largest lot on the Loop Road serves four trailheads: Door, Window, Notch and Castle. The Window Trail is a full boardwalk to a railed view of an eroded canyon, and the Door Trail passes through a break in the Wall…

Cedar Pass is the break in the Wall where the road drops from the upper prairie to the lower. Early motorists remembered it for scrub cedar and steaming radiators. The modern road still crosses a landslide here, and g…

Cliff Shelf Nature Trail climbs boardwalks and stairs through a juniper grove on a slumped block of the Wall. It is rated moderate, and it offers something rare in the Badlands: shade. A small pond sometimes forms and…

Stay on this road for about eight miles.

Cedar Pass is the park's service hub, with the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, exhibits, a theater, restrooms, picnic tables and a bottle-filling station. The center honors Ben Reifel, a Sičháŋǧu Lakota administrator from…

Highway 377 leaves the Loop Road here for the Interior Entrance, Cedar Pass Campground and the town of Interior. The Loop Road carries on as Highway 240, west toward Wall and east up Cedar Pass. It's the main fork on…

Stay on this road for about twenty-two miles.

Highway 377 leads to the town of Interior, which began as Black and moved when the Milwaukee Road arrived in 1907. It was a trading place for Lakota families and settlers alike. Interior's history runs through cattle…

Ben Millard came to the Badlands on bank business and stayed to build at Cedar Pass. Boone tells how one businessman fought over where this road would run, and the job that later had him buying land from his own neigh…

Few visitors know this road once ran through two tunnels. Both were removed within about four years of use, and only the slopes crowding the highway hint at the spot. Nearby stands Toadstool Rock, a Sharps Formation b…

The Fossil Exhibit Trail is a short, fully accessible boardwalk with touchable replicas, Braille and waysides on the animals that once lived here, from false cats to the giant brontothere. It is the easiest walk on th…

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…

Eroded formations fill the view, with the tall group called the Castle off past the valley and the White River country below. This is a good place to consider the Fort Laramie Treaty lands and the Pine Ridge Reservati…

A picnic area and overlook mark this break in the Wall, with tables, an accessible vault toilet and no water. The National Park Service identifies the area as a historic place on the December 1890 journey of the Minne…

The park gets about 16 inches of precipitation a year and has seen temperatures from 116 degrees to 40 below. Bison winter here without migrating, and their wallows catch the rain that other plants depend on. It is a…

Panorama Point looks out over the eroded formations and down toward the White River Valley, and the view is much like the one around Bigfoot Pass. The lot has exhibits and wheelchair-accessible sites. Its wide outlook…

In the early 1890s the Badlands hid more than fossils. Boone rides along with a Dakota cowboy named Bruce Siberts, who goes into the breaks after his stolen cattle and finds a good deal more trouble than he came for.

Most of the South Unit lies inside the former Pine Ridge gunnery and bombing range, taken from the reservation during World War II. Nothing of it shows from Highway 240. Clearing leftover ordnance is the work of a pro…

Josef Kudrna and Marie Loskota could not marry in the country they were born in, so they left it. Boone follows them from Bohemia to a homestead claim in a small basin past the Wall, and to a patent in Marie's own name.

Prairie and badlands meet in this view. In 1862 the first Homestead Act offered a citizen 160 acres in return for living on it and improving it for five years. Exhibits at the overlook explain the homesteading era, an…

Prairie dogs dig their towns along this part of the road, and they provide habitat for about 200 kinds of plants and animals. The black-footed ferret, among the most endangered mammals in the world, hunts them after d…

The National Park Service calls this lookout a complete geologic section of the park, with every layer present. Two bright paleosols, the Yellow Mounds and the Interior Paleosol, stand out in the view. Conata Basin is…

Yellow Mounds Overlook sits in the most colorful part of Badlands geology. Yellow, purple, gray and striped reddish beds appear in order from bottom to top: the Yellow Mounds paleosol, the Interior Paleosol, the Chadr…

In 1935 Frank Lloyd Wright rode out across the prairie toward this road and wrote a letter about what he found. Boone reads between the lines of a letter that praised this very road, and asks what the great architect…

This small pull-off sits on a geologic slump, where a little extra moisture lets trees grow. The park has recorded over 300 archaeological sites, evidence of the peoples who used this country season after season. Anyt…

Pinnacles Overlook is the highest point in the North Unit and the climax of the Loop Road. It faces south over the Sage Creek Wilderness, and on clear days the Black Hills show on the horizon. Canyons and sod tables f…

Stay on this road for about twenty-two miles.

Stay on this road for about eight miles.

The Pinnacles Entrance is the western gate on Highway 240, with rangers, maps and the park paper, and it takes cards only. Sage Creek Rim Road leaves the highway nearby for bison country and Roberts Prairie Dog Town.…

When the missile fields came to the ranches and wheat farms of western South Dakota, the neighbors had opinions. Boone tells the story of the landowners who lived on top of the Cold War, and how it ended.

Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the only drugstore in a town of 326 people and gave themselves five years to make it work. Boone tells what happened in the last hot summer of that bargain.

North of the Pinnacles Entrance, Highway 240 runs straight across the grass to Interstate 90 at Exit 110. Fuel, food and a place to rest are in the town of Wall, along with the U.S. Forest Service's National Grassland…

At the end of this street, turn left onto South Boulevard, then turn right onto Glenn Street, and stay straight under the interstate.

The eastbound tour starts in the town of Wall, near Exit 110, with fuel, food and water close by. From here Highway 240 runs south to the Pinnacles Entrance and then works down through the park to Exit 131. Downloadin…