The Badlands

This is from Madeline's journal entry today. I thought she described our day very well! Today, as the title implied, we visited the Badlands, which we of course rechristened the Misunderstoodlands. It was amazing. It's pretty hard to capture any of it on a page or a blog or a camera. It was breathtakingly beautiful. There were layers upon layers of canyon and mountain(kind of). You would be inside of a canyon and lo and behold, there's a miniature canyon right beneath your feet. There was all kinds of gravel and mud and lots and lots of rock, so much astounding detail that nothing but your own eyes could truly see. There were drop-offs and build-ups that you could climb on, and valleys and crags that you could explore. There was vegetation anywhere flat enough to hold it, and there was a lot of it! Goldenrod covered seemingly every surface around, there was thick, long grass all over the place, these tiny purple flowers spotted the fields every once in a while, and cacti with large orange or yellow flowers were embedded in the grass. There were these thriving plains to either side of the steep canyons, and they just seemed to drop off at points. There was so much variety in the Badlands, from rounded sunset colored rocks to jagged crumbling canyons, places devoid of all life to places mostly covered in grass and flowers. There were fields that had large rocky hills embedded in them, and cows all over the place. There were big horn sheep that climbed on these practically vertical walls, just jumping and running and frolicking on these cliffs. There were little lambs that were just playing around on a steep vertical drop. They were very fluffy and adorable. All the adult sheep were in the process of shedding their winter coats. We did a couple trails too, other than the car tour. The first one was the door trail. We traversed what seemed to be a scaled down canyon in a bigger canyon. We thought we'd be stopping around the fifth marker, but we went to the end. Any pictures we took didn't seem to show enough of the depth. Then we did window trail, which was a fifth of a mile round trip that ended in a breathtaking view and a wonderful breeze. We also did Notch trail, which was by far the most difficult and rewarding trip by far. It started off easy enough, going through a multi-height rocky field of flowers. The easy part ended at a stair/ladder type thing that scaled one of the larger formation walls. It was really high up, but as long as I didn't look down I was okay. At the top of that we had to move along this steeply changing gravely ledge that constantly made me feel like I was going to fall off the edge. It would have been easy too, because at some points we didn't have more than three feet of room, and it was gravely which made for some hard footing. At the end it plateaued and gave us a lot more room (and security). There was an epic viewpoint. We could see ridges and plains and everything. It was worth the injury my knees probably received received inching back down the terrifying ladder. I never thought the badlands would be so amazing. If I could stay anywhere for a week it would probably be here, but we have to move on, and that is okay. I'm coming back though. Someday.