Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places

Chapter 2 - Mixedgrass

Chapter 2 Mixedgrass 2.1 Wonderlands Badlands National Park, South Dakota I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping . . . —Willa Cather, My Ántonia1 Green! Lush, luxurious green! So this was the legendary sea of grass; here was the soft growth of Poaceae; now was Willa Cather’s “spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly , sinking suddenly.”2 I thought I needed to try something more spectacular—less desolate and more inhabitable—so headed northeast, destination South Dakota. I arrived at Badlands National Park on a glorious day, mid-May—a sunny, 138 Zen of the plaIns blue-sky-with-puffy-white-clouds, air-throbbing-with-spring sort of day. I should describe the drive: how I was so eager to get to there from Denver that I woke pre-dawn and zipped all the way along the Interstate instead of lingering on scenic back roads; how I hadn’t even turned off I-80 at Wall to drive through the bulk of the park, but rather stayed on the highway until I reached the exit nearer the Ben Reifel Visitor Center; how I had slowed slightly and opened my windows to let the fresh morning air and the liquid songs of meadowlarks permeate my car; how I caught my first glimpse of the jagged, pink-cream-red-striped mountains of clay, passed the parking area for the Notch Trail and Castle Trail, then rolled down the steep hill after Cliff Shelf and finally stopped at the visitor center; how I had introduced myself to a half-dozen new faces, then gotten directions to my new quarters; how I had begun to unpack my car, but, halfway through, finally looked up and around and realized, I’m here! I dashed out the back door, scrambled over a hill, flung myself down into a soft carpet of spring grass, and let my mind explode with, Green! “Bad” lands? (That night, a front moved through. The rest of the week was cold, grey, and drizzly. Hills turned to muck; wildflowers exploded.) The mixedgrass prairie of western South Dakota receives an average of eighteen inches of precipitation a year, most of which comes in the form of late spring-early summer rainstorms. Compared to the shortgrass and semi-desert farther west, where a good year might bring half that, this abundance of moisture nurtures riotous growth. The high plains are susceptible to climatic extremes, though—harsh blizzards and withering droughts; raging lightning-lit grassfires and periodic floods. Grasslands here teeter on the brink of barrenness. The term “bad lands” doesn’t refer to weather conditions, however —rather, the earth itself. Whereas some stretches of the unglaciated Northwestern Great Plains ecoregion are underlain by rich, dark soils, the Badlands are made up of siltstones and clays (the Chadron Formation), MIxedgrass 139 capped by layers of gravelly sandstones and siltstones (the Brule) and ashlaced fluvial and aeolian sediments (the Sharps). Like Arizona’s Painted Desert / Chinle Formation, Montana’s Hell Creek Formation, and the Little Missouri River badlands in North Dakota, the capital-B Badlands can’t support much vegetation: highly absorbent clay swells when wet, then shrinks when dry, leaving large cracks and curls in the surface and making it difficult for plants to take root; moreover, steep and siliceous hills erode at a rate of up to an inch a year, sloughing seedlings.3 Slick surfaces and rugged topography also make travel difficult. Indeed, the Badlands were named not for their inhospitableness or uninhabitability , but because French trappers and fur traders found them les mauvaises terres a traverser—“the bad lands to cross.” For the most part, Foxtail barley, Hordeum jubatum 140 Zen of the plaIns early nineteenth century explorers, travelers, and even native plains people tried to avoid the heart of the rugged region, particularly the sheer “wall” of clay that extends about 100 miles from the park to what is now an eponymous town. (The feature gained renown in 1890 when Lakota leader Spotted Elk escaped the United States cavalry by leading his Lakota Sioux people down a seemingly impassable cliff, through the...