Monday, September 04, 2017

Summer Vacation Redux #15: Badlands National Park, part 1 of 4

It was a little after 10:30 AM when I entered Badlands National Park and I can truly say I really did expect the stark beauty that I encountered.  In order to make the sharing of images manageable, I'm going to break them down into four sections.  The first will be the eastern Badlands.  Then I'll share images from the Ben Reifel Visitor Center which has a small museum.  Next we'll do the central Badlands, and I'll finish with the western Badlands and the Buffalo I encountered there. 



Badlands are not only found here.  They are actually a geographic feature characteristic of a plateau area that drops suddenly and dramatically along a jagged ridge of canyons and runs that expose layers of rock covering millions of years of geologic history and change.  That's my rather wordy explanation.  One of the things that is very curious to me in looking at the exposed layers here is how they go from pale and dusty grays to salmon and dusty rose reds.  I don't have the answer, but I found myself asking what occurred, nay, re-occurred in prolonged periods of time to replicate the extended presence of say iron in the rock--a leading source of red in most stones. 






When you look at landscapes like this, it isn't difficult to imagine why movies that want to film outside and depict alien landscapes like that of Mars come here to film.



Consumed by the enormity of the macro visual aspects of this place, it almost acts like a palate cleanser for the eyes to focus for a time on the equal delights of the micro-landscapes. 


I believe the frilly yellow flower in the mid-ground of the image below is called Matchbrush, Gutierrezia sarothrea.  It's a member of the aster family and blooms in July and August.  The other yellow flower with the larger blossoms is Curlycup Gumweed, Grindelia squarrosa--also a member of the aster family, but it blooms from June through November.

 The presence or lack of vegetation seemed to turn on a dime and reflect the slightest variations in the environment like elevation and exposure to wind.



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