Family Nature Summits: Black Hills Summit

"… I was unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands.  What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of the mysterious elsewhere – a distant architecture, ethereal… an endless supernatural world more spiritual than the earth but created out of it.”  Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935
“…some magnificent city of the dead…” (Dr John Evans, Explorer).
“…the whole region seems a part of another world…not easily forgotten…”  (Thaddeus Culbertson, paleontologist)
“…peaks and valleys of delicately banded colors – colors that shift in the sunlight…and a thousand tints that color charts do not show…”  (Freeman Tilden, conservation writer)

You can’t travel to southwest South Dakota and not visit the Badlands, or in Lakota, “mako sica”.  It’s too hot for a traditional hike, but this van trip will do the walking for you.  Your (mostly) fearless leader found a safe, flat gravel road that defines this land and brings you as up close and personal as such roads get!  This trip is repeated twice for the Summiteers’ convenience. This is our only trip to the Badlands and is open to photographers and those who want to experience the National Park.

Badlands National Park comprises two sections, the North and South Units, connected by a thin strip.  Our immersive road is located on this thin strip, and is, fortunately, the closest point of the Badlands to our Summit site.  One way, our trip to this site is 1 hour and 15 minutes, but worth every mile.  Our destination, Sheep Mountain Road, is, itself, less than 3 miles long and we’ll emerge from the vans at many stopping points along the road to collect unique and irreplaceable images. 

Our road is a live geology class that reveals many processes that created the Badlands.  From alluvial fans to hoodoos, the formations are right in front of you.  As inhospitable as the land seems, the land in and around the Badlands supported humans for 11,000 years.  The earliest people were mammoth hunters, followed by nomadic tribes, bison-hunting Lakota, and eventually trappers, miners, and homesteaders.  But the Badlands itself cannot be tamed and is a land of both dread and fascination

I will be bringing my cell phone, of course, but also my DSLR and one zoom lens that will accommodate my personal aesthetic.  I found the brightness of this environment to be challenging, due to my cell phone’s screen being quite hidden by the glare of the sun.  Cell phones will still gather amazing images, but help yourself out by bringing a wide-brimmed hat.  (If you don’t own one, before the Summit is the time to shop for one!)  It will shade the brightness sufficiently to help you see the screen and take your compositions more seriously.  A DSLR will be the key to slowing down and really painting your compositions on your image sensor.  With today’s image stabilization built in to most DSLR bodies and lenses, you will be able to make camera settings that allow you to leave the tripod at home or in your cabin.  Your (mostly) fearless leader will assist you in knowing those camera settings.

ABSOLUTELY NO OPEN SHOES OR SANDALS.  CLOSED HIKING SHOES OR SNEAKERS ONLY! YOU WILL THANK ME LATER.
(Comfort Note: There are no bathrooms, or trees to hide behind. But we can designate a private “room” behind the van.  Bring a bit of tissue and a plastic sandwich bag to collect your tissue. I’ll have a larger plastic bag to contain your used supplies and we’ll toss everything when we get to a waste bin back in civilization. It’s for this reason that I avoid coffee when heading to the wilderness without relief stations.  You might consider the same on this morning!)