OCTOber 2022

America’s Badlands

Where: Great Plains

Directions: North Dakota to Kansas  

Why so good:   

The Dakota Badlands of ragged canyons and clay buttes make up a landscape unlike any other in the United States. In fact, in the 1920s when the region was being developed as a national park the first name suggest was Wonderland National Park. Take that Yellowstone and Yosemite. The traditional disparaging term of “badlands” eventually held sway. Early settlers named the “badlands” since it was an ordeal to maneuver wagons through the coulees and depressions. And it was a nightmare if rains or sows had made the clay a muddy quagmire.

Sadly, your dog will not experience much of Badlands National Park in South Dakota or Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota except from what can be seen from the car window or from hiking down a ranch road. But….the Dakotas do not have a monopoly on America’s badlands. Here is a round-up of tail-friendly hiking opportunities in the badlands of other midwestern states:

North Dakota.

Is it possible for one million acres to be a “hidden” gem? If so, that is how to describe the Little Missouri National Grasslands, the largest federally managed grasslands in the country. For this canine hike disabuse your dog of any notions of an easy trot through a pasture. The Maah Daah Hey Trail - from the Mandan Hidatsa Indian language for “area that has been around for a long time” - courses through an eye-popping variety of terrain in its 144 miles. Yes, your dog will get time bounding through endless flat grasslands but there will also be climbs through some of the baddest of Dakota’s badlands. At the northern terminus of the MDHT a sporty counter-clockwise 11- mile loop can be welded with the Long X Trail, an historic cattle passage where Texas longhorns once kicked up sod. Your dog will likely still see cattle on the Long X today. The route begins in the bottomlands of the Little Missouri River, perfect for splashing and swimming for your dusty trail companion, before switchbacking on ledges through the clay buttes and coulees to magnificent views of the surrounding moonscape.

Montana.

Makoshika State Park takes its name from the Lakota word for “bad land.” This is The Big Sky State’s largest park with over 11,000 acres but most of the canine hikes are short affairs with several less than one mile. Do not conflate that with easy. The Cap Rock loop and the Kinney Coulee loop will give your dog all she wants in a hike while moving over and around multi-colored rock formations. For more extended explorations set off on the Hungry Joe Trail to link up with the Graveyard Coulee Trail. The badlands are known for yielding some of the richest bounties of dinosaur fossils in the country and Makoshika is a star of the 14-stop Montana Dinosaur Trail. Ten different species have been unearthed in the park, including nearly complete skeletons and a Triceratops skull.

Nebraska.

Your dog may come to the Oglala National Grasslands expecting to hike through amber waves of grain but the attrac- tion here are the “Little Badlands” of the Nebraska panhandle. At Toadstool Geologic Park the trotting is across stark, eroded rock formations where the tag team of water and wind have been at work for millions of years. The “toadstools” form when underlying soft claystone erodes faster than the hard sandstone that caps it. Your curious dog can also explore off the path for close-up looks in the gullies at fossil bone fragments that lace the rocks and 30-million year-old footprints pre- served in the stone. A mile-long interpretive loop tells the tale. For extended hikes, Toadstool Park connects to the world-renowned Hudson-Meng Bison Boneyard via a three-mile trail. This archeological site seeks to unravel the mystery of how over 600 bison died nearly 10,000 years ago in an area about the size of a football stadium. Human predation is the leading suspect. As you near the prehistoric kill bed your dog will experience the head-high grasses on the trail he was looking for from the Oglala Grasslands.

Kansas.

Lebanon, Kansas is the geographic center of the Lower 48, the farthest point from an ocean in the United States. Yet if fo back a few years, like 85 million, the entire region was under a great sea. Some of the most common fossils found in the Niobrara chalk formations of Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park are giant clams and oysters. The ancient walled city of Jerusalem was the name that stuck from looking at the castle-like rock formations that tower over the Smoky Hill River. The Life on the Rocks Trail is the star in this park and it does not descend into the formations but winds for over one mile along the edge of the badlands, leading to numerous overlooks.