Saturday, September 7, 2019
We didn’t end our last road trip with a drive through the Badlands, like we usually do, so we decided to take a little road trip one Saturday in September. I had been tossing the idea around all morning, but by the time we left and drove the four hours, it was after 4pm when we arrived…the perfect time to visit the Badlands!
The plan was to hike the Notch Trail. I had learned of the trail from the YouTube channel, America’s Parks, and it looked like a fun trail to try! Since we tend to drive through the park in the evening on the way home from our road trips, I thought it would be better to make it a day trip of its’ own.
Notch Trail
What makes a trail intriguing enough to drive four hours one way to go for a day hike? It has this giant ladder made of logs! Imagine our surprise when we found out that this kind of adventure was hiding out on a 1.5 mile trail in one of our favorite national parks to drive through on the way home from road trips! We had to go check it out!
The trail starts at the south end of the Door and Window trailhead and meanders through a short canyon until you reach this ladder. It looks a little sketchy, but all of the logs are solidly anchored to the ground, and they are tied together with a set of thick cables that are also anchored at the top and bottom.
The view from the top is worth the climb! From the top of the ladder, the trail continues on toward “The Notch.” The trail leading to the ladder is visible from above. Badlands National Park is a really good park for just driving through and stopping at the overlooks, but the Notch Trail gets you right up close and personal with the formations in a way that is different from the other short trails in the park. Not to mention, the views are spectacular!
There is one section of the trail that has a bit of a scary drop-off, with kind of creepy looking old signs to point you away from the edge of the cliff. There is plenty of space to walk without feeling like you’ll fall off, but I was glad to have big kids that wouldn’t tempt fate by peering over the edge near the sign! The photo above is the view from after we passed the creepy part. If you look closely, there are people on the ladder!
The trail leads to an overlook with this amazing view! We were lucky to be there with a sky that was filled with clouds that would occasionally let a little bit of late afternoon sun shine through. It’s one of those views you can’t stop looking at, especially with the changing late afternoon light. This scene would look entirely different in harsh midday sunshine, which is why we rarely stop at the park when we go by during the day.
I never imagined there would be so much texture in the formations. The ones you can see from up close at the overlooks, have been walked on so much that they seem more smooth and the ones that aren’t walked on are too far away to see so much texture.
There are many places where there are these straight lines in the rock. The photo with the black rocks is where there used to be one of these straight lines and that is what it looks like when the rest of the rock falls away. It leaves behind flat, black rock.
The Notch and the overlook are in two separate spots. The Notch, itself, isn’t terribly exciting, but it’s a unique view to get a peek of the land below from this little triangle-shaped opening in the rocks. From there, we headed back toward the ladder the same way we came.
There are also many little holes in the rock. It sort of looks like it should be a sponge! Apparently, the Badlands erodes at a rate of one inch per year! The national park website can explain the geology of the Badlands much better than I can, if anyone wants to read more about it.
On the way back, you can see the ladder and it’s kind of fascinating to see how the view of it changes as you get closer. I’m not sure which is more dramatic, the view of the ladder from further away or the view of it looking up from the bottom. I guess I didn’t think it looked nearly as daunting from the bottom as it does from this particular location, knowing we had to go back down the ladder soon.
Going down the ladder is trickier than going up the ladder, but we all made it back down and lived to tell the tale! The hike took us two hours and we hiked 1.4 miles. According to Gaia GPS, we had 105 feet of elevation gain. Presumably, most of that was in climbing up the ladder! Despite the look of that ladder, this was a fun and easy hike that we’d do again!
Sunset in the Badlands
After our hike, it was time to find a spot to watch the sunset. We took a gravel road north from the scenic drive and ended up at the border of the park. They have a pretty fancy sign sitting out in the middle of nowhere on a gravel road! There were no formations out that way, so we turned around and went back the way we came.
As we were driving back toward the scenic drive, before the sun set, we saw the tail end of a rainbow. What a magical scene to end our time in the park! We found a spot to watch the sunset and that was just as magical.
We are lucky to have some pretty amazing sunsets often in South Dakota, but we could not have asked for a better time to see this much drama play out in the sky! The clouds that had been hanging around all afternoon were stunning to watch as they changed colors over the rugged landscape.
When the show was finally over, we turned around and saw this blue scene in the other direction! What a way to end the day!
We were back on I90 for our drive home by 8pm. I’m not sure how long it took for all of those dramatic clouds to let loose, but we quickly found ourselves in a thunderstorm with some very heavy, pouring rain. I tucked the Durango in behind an RV that was going slow with his flashers on because we could barely see the road through the rain. Folks were parked under the bridges to wait out the storm, but I wanted to keep moving. However, when Joey checked my radar app, we had driven right into the middle of a red and purple blob. Good times!
I kept going slow behind Mr. Flashing RVer, but when we reached the Murdo exit, I had had enough of the white-knuckle driving in the pouring rain, so we pulled off to take a break at a nearby gas station. We took our time getting gas, using the restrooms, and looking around the convenience store for a bit. By the time we were ready to get back on the road again, the rain had let up and was just your average rainy night. I checked the radar app again to see if we’d be driving right back into the storm, but it appeared that the worst of it was over and we’d just have a green blob of rain for a while. That, I could handle, and we drove the rest of the way home without any more fun with weather.
It might have been a little crazy to drive eight hours round-trip to go on a little hike, but we were rewarded with such an amazing sunset to top off our trip. I wouldn’t trade this adventure with the kids for anything!
The world of travel changed just a few short months after this trip. Subscribe to find out where our next adventure takes us!