In search of the buffalo: From the Badlands to the Black Hills
A solo sojourn through South Dakota
Written by Lauren
This post contains affiliate links.
Whenever I inevitably get asked the question, What’s one of your favorite places you’ve traveled to? My answer does never not surprise everyone: South Dakota.
It’s never the response they’re looking for. (The answer they’re looking for: Thailand. Definitively Thailand is the “impressive” answer they want to hear. And no, I haven’t been there yet. I’ll get there when I get there. If I get there.)
“South Dakota, really?”
Yes, really.
South Dakota was, and remains, one of the most spiritually profound places I’ve ever had the good fortune to wander. Those lands hold powerful medicine. And, I believe, I was called there at just the moment I needed to be there.
Five years ago, I found myself in the undeniable downward spiral before a cataclysmic explosion.
The deep breath before pulling the trigger, lighting the match on the dynamite that would blow up my entire life in a *most* spectacular fashion.
Rewind five years. July of 2020. I needn’t remind you of where we were at at the time.
What I now see as the last, final, best attempt at making the life I had spent the better part of a decade building for myself work … was quickly unraveling and crumbling beneath my feet.
The book is expansive in its coverage of how the American West “was won” through the forced relocation, disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and massacre of Indigenous tribes.
The book ends with the Wounded Knee Massacre of the Lakota Tribe of South Dakota in 1890, what has now gone down in history as the last major military offensive by the US Army on Native Americans.
The Lakota Tribe is one of three tribes of the larger Sioux Nation. Also composed of the Dakota and Nakota Tribes.
In a way I didn’t fully understand at the time, I felt great kinship with the Lakota Sioux, saw so much of my own story reflected in theirs—the systematic stripping of sovereignty when all one truly desired was peace to live in their own ways and in their own rhythms.
A thread that weaves through the story of Native American history is their coexistence with the buffalo (technically: bison). As the US Army and pioneers conquered the West, not only were Indigenous lives sacrificed in the millions (historians estimate a loss of upwards of 90% of Indigenous populations at the time of westward expansion and colonization), but so too were the wild herds of buffalo.
To give you a full picture: at the beginning of the 19th Century, as many as 30 to 60 MILLION wild buffalo roamed America. By 1890 (90 years later), there were less than 1,000 still standing.
And yet, much like the Lakota, they still remain today.
In fact, good news!
Bison numbers are growing. Conservation efforts focusing on bringing back and restoring wild buffalo numbers are proving to be successful.
Some numbers for you:
~ 20,500 bison in conservation herds
~ 420,000 in commercial herds
~ 11,000-13,000 bison roaming in the US and Canada that are “nearly purebred” (read: lack of interbreeding with domestic cattle). These resemble most closely the bison of the past
I needed to go see wild buffalo.
Itinerary Overview
July 18 – 25, 2020 Miles driven to destination: 1,047
The vibe: wide open spaces The goal: see wild buffalo
Itinerary
It occurs to me here, as it always does:
How in the actual fuck did I manage to cover so much ground in so little time?
You’ll also notice a certain mountain with four carved figureheads (Mount Rushmore. I’m talking about Mount Rushmore) is missing from this itinerary. I truly didn’t have the time. And also, I was perhaps still feeling a bit salty about the blatant colonization of these lands. Carving white dudes faces into sacred native lands? The audacity.
The journey begins
But first, the playlist …
Can’t have a roadtrip without a playlist (I don’t make the rules)
Lost — The Goo Goo Dolls Running to the Hills — Dan Owen Ends of the Earth — Lord Huron Wide Open Spaces — The Chicks Cowboy Take Me Away — The Chicks So Much Sky — The Temper Trap Traveller — Chris Stapleton Send the Sun — Nikki Lane Scenes — Miranda Lambert Highway Queen — Nikki Lane Southpaw — Kip Moore Mrs. Potters Lullaby — Counting Crows
Getting there: 2 days and 1,047 miles
My journey started with a two and a half hour drive across Michigan to board the Lake Express ferry to cross Lake Michigan from Muskegon to Milwaukee. First time driving on to a ferry for me!
From there, I drove another two hours to Lodi, Wisconsin where I stopped for the night.
The next day, I drove the remaining ten hours to Wall, South Dakota.
Highlights from the drive
Crossing the Mighty Mississippi
I-90, the highway that cuts west to east through the bottom of South Dakota, has a 80mph speed limit!
And a billboard for a restaurant that read, “Mexican food so good Trump would build a wall around it.” Good to see people still have a sense of humor in times like these.
Into the Badlands
Location: southwest corner of south dakota Duration of stay: 1 day (doable but I’d extend to 2 days if you have the time)
Wall Drug (+ dinosaur)
I started my morning with breakfast and a browse through Wall Drug.
For those who don’t know, Wall Drug is a massive (76,000 square feet massive) complex of gift stores and restaurants to meet all your rugged, western frontiersmen needs—complete with extensive wood paneling and mounted animal heads galore.
Opened since 1931, their main draw (besides for the dino) is their free ice-cold water.
I don’t want to stay you haven’t been to South Dakota unless you’ve been to Wall Drug, but I will—
You haven’t been to South Dakota until you’ve been to Wall Drug.
Wall Drug
I especially enjoyed the Hole in the Wall Bookstore for all your western reading needs and Western Art Gallery Restaurant for coffee and breakfast before hitting the park.
From Wall Drug, it’s just an eleven minute straight shot down 240, past the boondocks campgrounds, to the Pinnacles entrance of Badlands National Park.
Badlands National Park
Opened: 1939 Size: 240,000 acres Buffalo on site: ~1200
Composed of three parts. One of which (along with the White River Visitor Center) is located within Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The North Unit 64,000 acre Badlands Wilderness Area + Badlands Loop Road with scenic overlooks and trailheads
The Lakota called it mako sica. The French, les mauvaises terrestrial à traverser. The “bad lands” in any language, the landscape is a place of extremes. Of peaks, gullies, buttes, and prairies.
Here you’ll find:
Bison (which can run faster than 30mph) Rattlesnakes Spiders Strong sun and unrelenting heat An ever shifting landscape Prairie dogs Coyotes Fossils Wildflowers Summer storms Scenic overlooks Ben Reifel Visitor Center (If memory serves, the visitor center was closed due to COVID. Y’all know I would never miss an opportunity to browse the bookstore.)
“I’ve been about the world a lot, and pretty much over our own country, but I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands … what I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere—a distant architecture, ethereal … an endless supernatural world more spiritual than earth but created out of it.”
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, 1935
When I pulled up to the visitor’s booth to buy my pass for the day, I was in the high throes of Period Fever (iykyk) and was terrified that the ranger was going to take one glance at my sweaty, clammy forehead and deny me entrance to the park thinking it was COVID (remember it was the height of 2020).
Alas, my worst fears never came to pass and before I knew it, I was free and clear and on my way.
Yellow Mounds Overlook
My first stop was the Yellow Mounds Overlook.
I parked the car in one of the lots lining 240 and wandered about.
One of the best parts about Badlands National park is that it’s one of the few national parks you can get off the beaten path and wander wherever your heart desires.
Out here, on my own, it was the feeling of absolute freedom
After my walkabout, I continued driving the Badlands Loop Road, pulling off to take in the views at whichever scenic overlook beckoned me.
Castle Trail to Medicine Root Loop
Trail distance: a million bazillion (6.5) miles
And then, an afternoon hike. Through a prairie (grasslands too dry for trees, but too wet for deserts) that felt like a desert.
I wrote my name and information in the backcountry registration log (a first for me), and my journey began.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
If my walkabout over and through the Yellow Mounds had felt like freedom, than this journey through the summer wildflower prairie and the summer storm that darkened the sky upon my return, felt like expansion, a depth, a portal to the spirit realm.
It was hot, it was dry, and it was everything.
The badlands sky does some spectacular things before a storm
Back at the car, watching the summer evening storm roll in on the horizon, I was a different person. The land had changed me, spoke to me. Story ideas exploded in my head.
notes on the journey
Badlands National Park
Sheep Elk Prairie dogs Also — lots of horses, yearlings running + playing
And more importantly …. Bison — my first sightings!! Off 79 (which unfortunately, I now have no recollection or faintest idea of where this is at)
Badlands Loop 240 Took me one to two hours
44 through Buffalo Gap National Grassland “SO BEAUTIFUL!!”
size: 600,000 acres Go for: Expansive views, solitude, prairie dogs See notes above
This moment—when I’d turned around from the prairie dogs and saw my trusty travel steed (Loretta) standing vigil on the side of the road reflecting the storm clouds backdropped against the prairie grasses—that was the moment something inside me cracked wide open.
I think that was the first moment I’d really truly breathed. Something in me coming back to life again, breathing spirit back into my bones.
I was alone and I’d never felt more free.
Scenic
Designation: ghost town
Could not come all this way and not take a stroll down Main Street. Because who doesn’t love a ghost town?
Flatiron Historic Sandstone Inn 745 North River Street Hot Springs, South Dakota
Sadly, has closed since.
Feeling like an old school cowboy gone modern at the FlatIron Historic Sandstone Inn
I booked suite 8 (very last minute on Airbnb, very thankful they had a vacancy), and, not gonna lie, felt like I had a true western boarding room experience.
What I loved:
– outdoor oasis that I usually had all to myself
– walkable to the little strip of stores & diners
– the cutest library
– easy parking (right outside my room in the back alley)
– good price!
– and even though my room didn’t have a bathroom (some suites do) and I had to use the bathroom down the hall, I don’t think I ever ran into anyone else the entire time I was there!
You might think a state park would be less impressive than a national one. Alas, I made the same mistake.
Custer State Park is a beautiful jewelry box of pristine lakes, winding rivers, windswept prairies, and mountain vistas with camp grounds, hiking trails, fishing spots, and three scenic drives (we love a good scenic drive, do we not?)
Needles Highway (SD Hwy 87 North)
Distance: 14 miles Expected travel time: 60+ minutes
Iron Mountain Road
Distance: 17 miles Expected travel time: 60+ minutes
Wildlife Loop Road
Distance: 18 miles Expected travel time: 1 hour 30 minutes—prepare for buffalo
I took the Wildlife Loop Road to the Prairie Trail trailhead.
Returning buffalo to Tribal lands + Native stewardship
Rematriation:
A concept and practice focusing on restoring Indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on restoring balance and right relationships with the land and with each other.
Given that buffalo are matriarchal, its only fitting this effort is being led by women
“They thought they could bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”
I wanna walk and not run I wanna skip and not fall I wanna look at the horizon and not see a building standing tall I wanna be the only one for miles and miles
COWBOY TAKE ME AWAY • The Chicks
After my hike, I drove to the Blue Bell Picnic Area and sat near French Creek.
It takes the shape of a place out west But what it holds for her, she hasn’t yet guessed She needs wide open spaces Room to make her big mistakes She needs new faces She knows the high stakes
WIDE OPEN SPACES • The Chicks
Scenic overlook + vista views
It was here, all of day four into my solo sojourn that I had found myself—good and truly—in a now or never moment.
Though here, I was looking out across the Black Hills shadowed by scattered clouds above, back home, we were quite literally days away from breaking ground on a custom built home. The start of what was supposed to be our next era. A new decade on new land. A brand new chapter of our life together.
One that was supposed to look like a beautiful home life filled with friends and family and gardens half the year, and a life of travel on the road the other half.
But it was out here, all alone, that clarity started to come in.
How do you put into words the moment you know? The slow unwinding, the slow spiral of knowing that catches an unstoppable momentum …
That the person you’d married, the person you’d spent the better part of half your life with, was not the person you thought they were? The moment when you realize that every dream you’d had of the life you wanted to build with this person hadn’t just crumbled to ash, but had maybe never even been real to begin with?
It was a moment of Knowing—that not only did I not want to move forward with this person, but that I could not. The life I’d envisioned was just not possible with the person I was married to.
I still wanted the beautiful home with the friends and garden. I still wanted the Airstream adventures under western desert skies and blue ridge mountain trails.
I just didn’t want it with him.
I still wanted that epic, timeless, playful, childlike, actual real love. I still wanted that moment when you look over at them—and they’re looking at you as if you hold the entire world together, like there is nowhere else in the all the universe they’d rather be, than right there, next to you. And you’re both just happy to be there, with each other.
But this? This wasn’t it. It never had been.
It’s a hell of a thing to know, to admit to yourself.
The clarity was as confusing as it was staggering in its cognitive dissonance.
Why did it feel like I couldn’t breathe? Why did my voice feel eternally caught in my throat? Why did I feel so chained and tethered, so caged, if I was so “free”? Why did it feel like I didn’t really have a say when I had the illusion of it? Why did I feel so utterly spent, drained and depleted and dried out? Why did it feel like my very life force had been slowly siphoned away from me and how had I not known? Why did I feel so empty of love? Why did I not feel loved? What even was love?
As the pieces of truth started trickling into place, I still didn’t logically understand the how or the why or even the what, but I knew in my body, in my soul, in a way I could not come back from.
A gilded cage is still a cage, after all.
As I walked back to my car from the overlook, I knew—I knew that I knew that I knew—in an unshakeable, irrevocable, utterly undeniable way that that was not my path.
I had walked this road to the very edge. I had moved every chess piece on the board in every direction it could possibly go. I had played every card in my hand. I had thrown myself ceaselessly against the bars of my cage until I’d collapsed of utter exhaustion. I could not take one step further.
From the side of a national byway I made the call—the call that would begin to set the demolition in motion.
It was then, for the very first time in nine years, I took my wedding band off. Such a simple thing—a band of silver, no diamonds, no engravings or etchings, no adornments. Its weight clunked into the drink holder.
My entire world had just shifted on its axis.
And yet, out in the wilderness, life continued.
What does one do after such a monumentous event?
One drinks, of course.
Custer
(the town, not the park)
Designation: pioneer tourist town in the Black Hills Population: 1829
Here you’ll find:
painted buffalo statues boutiques and gift shops outdoor outfitters hotels + motels restaurants, bars, tap houses bait, boots and swinging saloon doors
I popped into Calamity Jane’s Kitchen for coffee (one does not walk by such an establishment with such a namesake and not go in—I don’t make the rules).
According to the Google,
A woman after my own heart, truly.
Prairie Berry Winery
Currently closed, but it was a lovely way to spend / commemorate? / the afternoons events.
It takes the shape of a place out west Oglala National Grassland
Location: Northwest corner of nebraska Size: 94,520 acres
I don’t remember what called me here.
Besides for the continued lure of open space (because apparently the open spaces I’d already encountered weren’t enough?) and to see the stars.
I wanted to watch the sunset over the plains, and then, sit under “a blanket of stars” to quote our favorite Chicks. So after a day of lounging around Hot Springs and the inn, I packed up the cooler, headed 43 miles south on 71, and did just that.
And every once in awhile, you stumble across something that makes you remember you’re apart of a tapestry that is so much bigger than just yourself
Oglala National Grassland is managed by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Which means: it is land that is open to the public for hiking, hunting, and camping. Some of its vast acres are leased out by ranchers for grazing cattle.
I just drove down 71 until I found a road with an open gate. Then I parked somewhere off-road.
Cause sometimes you have to drive so far, to where even your gps doesn’t know where you are, so that all you can see is sky + stars and all you can hear is wind across the plains + coyotes calling in the distance (and the cows mooing goodnight to each other in the pasture over yonder) …
… and then, out there where you can actually hear your own thoughts, you just … stop. Stop thinking, stop analyzing, stop and just … exist. Just be. And remember what it means to just be a human again and get lost in the magnificently wonderful mess of it all.
It took longer than I’d expected for the stars to good and truly come out, and I was growing increasingly unnerved by the fact that it was pitch black out with no lights anywhere (perfect for starring, not so perfect for nighttime navigation) with only a very confused GPS to get me home. It was basically a straight shot back, but I was anxious to get going and get back to where the satellite could find me.
So, I settled for driving under the stars with my rooftop window open.
For my last day in the Black Hills, I headed back Wind Cave National Park.
Without a destination in mind, I followed backroads, seeing where they might take me.
And it was out there, that I found myself, one on one, with a buffalo bull. (I watched from inside my car at quite the distance. Still mesmerizing, nonetheless.)
Bison are the largest land mammal in North America.
Adult males weigh in at 1100 to 2000 lbs and stand up to six feet tall. Adult females weigh in at half that at 790 to 1200 lbs.
Bison can run up to 40 miles per hour — you cannot even hope to outrun them!
I walked to the crest of a hill, prairie grass crunching beneath my boots, and saw below me, a herd of wild buffalo kicking dust up into the wind.
And I cried.
They were still here. I was still here, too.
Tears streamed down my face as I remembered all that has been lost, all that still remains & that something ancient and wild still lives in me too.
This. This is what I drove 1,151 miles by myself for.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the herd in Wind Cave is one of the “nearly purebred” herds most resembling the bison of the past with the least amount of genetic interference by domesticated cattle.
Black Hills
3 – 7 days
BUFFALO Tasting Trail Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary
On the way home, I decided to go through Iowa instead of taking the ferry back across Lake Michigan.
Somewhere, amidst the rolling waves of amber grain that is America’s breadbasket, I really, really had to pee.
There are times, when you are traveling by yourself, you get that tingly spidey-sense, that feeling of hey, maybe this isn’t the best play here. But when nature calls . . .
I pulled off the highway at the next exit with a gas station sign. Rolling past acre after acre after acre of Monsanto-owned crops (there were signs—lots of signs), the corn stalks started to feel like they were pressing in. Towering over me.
A creepy ass kid was about to walk straight out of that corn field. I just knew it.
When I pulled into the gas station, I watched from my car (doors locked) as a revivalist Pentecostal Mennonite family exited the store. The ominous feeling did not abate.
This is where it ends, isn’t it? In some little map dot of a town in fucking Iowa. They could kill me right now, bury me in the corn fields, and no one would ever know. But fuck it, I really gotta pee.
Alas …. You’re reading this. So, I’m still here.
The horrors persist, but so do I.
(I really have nothing against pentecostals or mennonites or Iowa, but the horror movie vibes were vibing hard that Friday summer evening.)
Not to be outdone by my almost (not even a little bit) untimely murder in a small town, I arrived that evening to the historic Black Hawk Hotel in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
The first thing I see when I pulled into the parking lot:
Ghost hunters on site.
Huh, how cool, she thought, just like a Supernatural episode! So innocent, so naive.
After checking in, the key to my door wouldn’t work. Not an electronic key card—oh no, my friend, this was a historic establishment in Cedar Falls, Iowa, after all—we’re talking an actual metal, stick it in the door, turn and unlock, key.
Back downstairs to get the desk manager. Back upstairs. A turn. A swift kick. A prayer. Hallelujah! The door opened.
Giving Supernatural
After nine plus hours in the car, your girl needed a shower.
NO! I can hear you scream. Not the shower! Anywhere but the shower!
Yes, the shower.
So there I was, washing my hair, minding my own goddamned business, when those spidey-senses started a-tingling once again. Pinpricks at the base of my skull, down my back.
You know that sensation where you feel like you’re being watched?
Yup.
I opened my eyes, turned towards the sliding glass shower door, and watched, with my two seeing balls, as the door very slowly, very deliberately slid open.
It’s gotta be slanted, I thought. I closed the door, and waited, for surely, it was going to start sliding open again.
Nope.
“Absolutely the fuck not!” I said out loud to the spirit that, I now very clearly knew, was haunting the room. “Now, you listen here. It is fucking rude to spy on people taking showers without their consent. I do not give it. Get out of here, and if you still have something to say to me, you can say it later when I get out and am dressed. Are we understood?”
They understood the assignment.
After I got out of the shower and was dressed, I sat down on the bed to eat my Wendy’s takeout I’d picked up earlier, and said to the room:
“Okay, I really would just like to eat my dinner and go to bed in peace. I’m not here for any bad vibes, but if you have something you need to say to me, I am listening” . . . “No? Nothing?” … “Okay, so we cool, then?” … “Cool.”
The rest of the stay went without incident.
I will say, I’ve never had such a direct experience with a ghost before (at least not that I can remember, I had a very active imagination as a child and my cousin and I were obsessed with Drop Dead Fred and So Weird!), but I was not getting any malicious energy from them ~ perhaps just some mischievousness. I’m always here for the shenans.
I’m quite proud of how I handled it all, have to say.
And the next day, 9 hours and 590 miles later, I was home.
X marks the spot
South Dakota: From the Badlands to the Black Hills
Into the Badlands
Wall Drug Badlands National Park Castle Trail to Medicine Root Trail Badlands Loop 240 Buffalo Gap National Grassland Scenic America’s Best value Inn
Black Hills
Hot Springs Wind Cave National Park Custer State Park Wildlife Loop Road Prairie Trail Custer Tasting Trail Oglala National Grassland
I think, back then, I was being protected from the fullness of knowing.
Because the truth is, the knowing didn’t happen all at once.
It happened over the next few weeks in several seismic shifts, each one accompanied by tidal waves of tears.
It happened in the months that followed. The separation, the moving out, filing for divorce, signing a new lease for my own place. The exhilaration, the freedom, the searing pain, the raw wound, the catatonic fugue states. The emptiness, the echoing void.
Blue pill. Red pill. Down the rabbit hole.
It would take years of untangling the threads, unburdening the weight of the crippling cognitive dissonance for me to see the whole mountain all at once. For me to allow myself to see the whole mountain all at once, for what it was.
The years since then have not been easy. They have not been soft or kind.
If the decade before had been a cage that had left me in an extended state of suspended animation, then the five years since have been nothing short of an alchemical forge ~ at times, all consuming in its fiery flames—purifying: release and rage; the darkest of pits at others.
It was not easy, climbing out of the depths of that grief, of that pain. Healing, rebuilding, remembering who I am—who I’d always been all along. I think the trap is believing it was ever supposed to be. Believing the things we’ve endured, the fires we’ve walked through, wouldn’t leave scars.
But standing here today, I find myself filled with immense gratitude for the woman who was brave enough to make the decision to walk away from it all. It was the hard decisions she was willing to make then that made where I am at right now possible.
Because of her, I still get to … fall in love again, have that breathless pause before a first kiss again. I still get to follow my dreams, wherever they take me, in whatever form they may take. I still get to stumble and falter my way through it all. I still get to have those Airstream adventures out west with a person I love more than life itself. I still get to have all those things, and more.
Because she was brave, even though she was scared. Because she dared, even though she didn’t know what would come next.
Five years go, I took my first solo trip. I was 28 years old and I was just about to set my life on fire, just as it was threatening to implode.
This trip was the first step away from everything I knew, everything I’d been building up to that point. It was also the first step toward freedom, toward truth, toward myself. My first step back home.
I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew—I knew in the way that your body knows before your mind does—that I could not stay. Would not. To stay meant certain death.
So I left. I left to see the wild buffalo and those wild open spaces of the west. And then I left my life, left a marriage, that I wonder now, if it was ever a real thing at all.
I wonder now, if there will ever be a July that I don’t think about South Dakota and this moment in my life, when I don’t think about the way it felt to drive the winding roads of the black hills, to feel the badlands beneath my feet.
The feeling of standing on the precipice before a free fall.
The exquisite painful gasp of air after unconscious blackness.
Of freedom.
Sometimes, you have to set it all on fire, burn it all down to the ground, just to get a clear view of the sky again.
Detroit-born, Nashville-bent, everywhere-bound, some of her favorite things include drinking coffee, eating in roadside diners frequented by locals and truckers alike, reading entire guidebooks front to back, visiting local bookshops, spirit questing in New Mexico, watching wildlife documentaries, listening to unapologetic amounts of Taylor Swift, and sitting in aisle seats. To name a few.
Expedia
Expedia
Expedia
Expedia
