The white clays in the foreground (appearing bluish at dusk) are eroding smoothly into deep channels, resembling folded cloth impregnated with plaster. This formation was approximately ten feet high (there is a large sod table on the far side, a higher plateau); others were twice as high.  I was walking in a drainage area, lower than the road at the Visitor Center in Cedar Pass, which is located just behind (and below) my apartment here. Water run-off has formed similarly-smooth gullies in the clay pan sediments, which are simultaneously MUDDY and CRACKED.  Weird place. The formations are pale, mudstones trending to ruddy Brule layers in higher formations.  These clays feature channel sandstone (or is it limestone?) layers near their tops, often undercut and crumbling, and studded with rust-colored concretions.  I saw fossil bones in several locations, as well as a lot of mule deer scat, coyote tracks, and mouse-tunnels.

As I write this note, the coyotes are howling their heads off outside! My window is still open a few inches, since it was so warm today. The howls were so eerie and near, I thought it was my own stomach making noises! I cracked my door to see what the moon looked like (quietly, so as not to wake any neighbors) and when I stepped outside, I was surrounded by a herd of mule deer who’d been grazing on the lawn of the staff-housing compound. They snorted and tore off in all directions, probably thinking I was a coyote.

I wanted to share this lovely old diagram — Osborn’s 1909 “Idealized Bird’s Eye View of the Great Badlands of South Dakota, Showing Channel and Overflow Deposits in the Oligocene and Lower Miocene.” First, it is a lovely visualization, in that many disparate elements are depicted, yet it remains meaningful and readable at a glance.

Osborn’s diagram is outdated, but this image is still reproduced in many of the books I have read, because it is helpful in identifying the geological layers. For those who are not familiar with the Badlands area: not all of these layers are visible at any one location. The top layers (above the pinnacles) are revealed in the higher terrain of the Pine Ridge Reservation, and parts of the South Unit of the Badlands. The highest point in the drawing (porcupine butte) is where the KILI radio station and tower are located.

The lower mounds in the diagram are not revealed unless you are on the Lower Grasslands level of the Badlands, approx. 2500 feet I’d say, from memory, from White River to Conata Basin and Sage Creek, although again, these formations are on an “incline” and disappear/reappear as you move around the park.

At any rate, this is one of the diagrams I’ve found most meaningful. Technically it is no longer correct in terms of dating, but timeline shifts are easy to make in your mind. The Chadron and Brule have remapped to from “Oligocene and Lower Miocene” down to Eocene and Oligocene, roughly speaking. Keep in mind that these materials were “deposited” at the above times, and the dates are based on fossils found within the layers. But the sediment’s origin itself may be elsewhere; materials were transported here by wind (ash) or water (mud/stone). Hope this helps those who’ve asked me, in one way or another, “how old” are the Badlands!

Fossil Bone

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

I’m getting much better at spotting broken fragments of bone. If only I knew more about connecting the dots: which ancient creatures made which fragments. Especially tough when the formation they’ve weathered out of is gone, and and you’re seeing a fossil fragment on clay pan. Sigh. In my next life, I want to be a paleontologist. And a park ranger, and an astronaut, and a librarian, and……

Quick post to share a bibliography — what the poet has been reading — from the past month.  Rich grist for the poetry mill!  Some of these books are my own, but most are from the park’s library. I must return them next week; I feel like a traveling monk surrounded by manuscripts in a distant abbey’s library, furiously reading before he must leave. I know I promised to send specific titles to various people (who want to look for them at their local libraries), but here’s the complete list instead. Gusty morning here, but it promises to be another gorgeous day in the Badlands! Putting the books down, and heading outside.

• • Anderson, Bridget. What Fossils Tell Us: The History of Life (World of Science: Come Learn with Me). Hong Kong: Lickle Publishing, 2003.
• • Black Bear, Sr., Ben, and R. D. Theisz. Songs and Dances of the Lakota. 2nd Printing ed. Aberdeen, South Dakota: North Plains Press, 1984.
• • Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.
• • Depostional Environments, Lithostratigraphy, and Biostratigraphy of the White River and Arikaree Groups; Late Eocene to Early Miocene, North America. (Special Paper # 325, Geological Society of America). Austin, Texas: Geological Society Of America, 1998.
• • Gries, John Paul. Roadside Geology of South Dakota (Roadside Geology Series) (Roadside Geology Series). 1st Edition ed. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1996.
• • Hauk, Joy Keve. Badlands: Its Life and Landscape. 1969. Reprint, Seattle: Badlands Natural History Association, 2006.
• • Harksen, J. C. Guidebook to the major Cenozoic deposits of southwestern South Dakota (South Dakota Geological Survey Guidebook). Vermillion, South Dakota: Science Center, University Of South Dakota, 1969.
• • Herring, Scott. Lines on the Land: Writers, Art, and the National Parks. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 2004.
• • Jaffe, Mark. Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh. New York: Crown, 2000.
• • Johnson, Morris D. Black and White Spy: The Magpie. Honolulu, 1988.
• • Meade, Dorothy C. Heart Bags & Hand Shakes: The Story of the Cook Collection. 1st ed. Lake Ann, MI: National Woodlands Publishing Company, 1994.
• • Miller, Lenore Hendler. The Nature Specialist: A Complete Guide to Program and Activities. Martinsville, Indiana: American Camping Association, 1986.
• • Moore, George William. Uranium-bearing Sandstone in the White River Badlands, Pennington County, South Dakota (Geological Survey circular). Denver: U.S. Dept. Of The Interior, Geological Survey, 1955.
• • Neihardt, John G. (Flaming Rainbow). The Twilight of the Sioux: The Song of the Indian Wars, The Song of the Messiah (Volume II of A Cycle of the West). Cambridge, MA: Univ. Of Nebraska Press, 1971.
• • Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Toronto, Canada: Bison Books, 1988.
• • Prothero, Donald R. The Eocene-Oligocene Transition. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• • Retallack, Gregory J. A Colour Guide to Paleosols. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
• • Retallack, Gregory J. Soils of the Past. 2 ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.
• • Schumm, Stanley Alfred. Evolution of Drainage Systems and Slopes in Badlands at Perth Amboy, New Jersey. New York: Dept. Of Geology, Columbia University, 1954.
• • Serrell, Beverly. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996.
• • Sheire, James W. The Badlands: Historical Basic Data Study. New York: Department of the Interior, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1969.
• • Turnbull, David. Maps Are Territories: Science in an Atlas. Westport, CT: Hyperion Books, 1995.
• • Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: The Guilford Press, 1992.

This stone holds a large bone cast and bone fragment. Many stones in the Saddle Pass area contain evidence of fossil bones, although many are quite small — mammal bones of all sizes, as well as what appeared to be tiny clamshells in thin limestone layers.  Broken fragments and hints abound, windows into prehistory.

I have been reading about all sorts of things: books on paleosols, the interpretation of coprolite fossils, root-traces, limestones, ash dating, the magnetic properties of shales. One topic leads me to reference the index of another book, drilling down and down into the materials.   Once, I’ve learned, there was a relative of the beaver with a special knack for digging corkscrew-shaped burrows, instead of building lodges.  Palaeocastor – whose fossilized burrows are found today just south of the Badlands, exposed in the Arikareean deposits of Western Nebraska.  What a beautiful image!  Locals, not knowing what these formations were, called them the Devil’s corkscrews.   I am left pondering the words of Walt Whitman, whose poems I loved, but who advised: “You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness – ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things.” Is this true, Walt?  Really?   The world fascinates me, in both minutia and grandiosity.  The more I learn, the more beautiful it becomes.  No mundane burrow or scientific description seems unlovely. How could you be right, Walt Whitman?  And yet you were right about so much.

Palaeocastor Burrow

Floodwaters with Muskrat (White River)

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

Note the creature swimming through the reflection?…. I am pretty sure it was a muskrat… swimming through the flooded fields.  The White River’s channel lies *behind* that line of cottonwood trees (between the trees and the hillside).

Speaking of which:  I’m still trying to nail down my stratigraphic ID-skills.  At first I thought that the dark gray river-cut hillside in the distance was Pierre Shale, which would have been deposited as black marine mud sediments (from a great shallow inland sea that once covered this area). The Pierre Shale holds small fossils like ammonite shells, and even ancient sea-turtles and mosasaurs, which swam in the ancient seas. Pierre Shales are a glimpse back to the Late Cretaceous, so it lies before (under) the great extinction event known as the K/T boundary.  Upon further reflection and reading  — ! — I think this hillside is actually one of the northernmost examples of the Pine Ridge Escarpment, which runs all the way down into Nebraska. It looked darker than it really is at this time, because the sediments are damp. Still, escarpment is a landform term, and tells me more about the shape and history of the terrain, but I’m still foggy on the composition.  From what I can tell, the Pine Ridge Escarpment is a drainage system feature.  According to geomorphology professor Eric Clausen, the “Pine Ridge Escarpment is the south wall of what was a giant headcut that eroded west along the White River valley alignment to capture an immense southeast-oriented flood, including flood waters moving around the Black Hills south end.” This suggests to me that the far bank of the White River is revealing a cut-away view of blended sediments deposited in a wide fan (a gentle delta?) that once reached from the foothills of the eroding Rockies to the plains of the Dakotas. If this is the case, I’d guess that the sediments have been moved and worked and reworked by successive flooding events — even as they are in this week’s flooding. At any rate: I’ve been reading a book about the shift from the Eocene to the Oligocene, which has informed my re-reading of the cut bank of the White River. Perhaps an eminent geologist will stumble on my post one day, and they will write to me explaining exactly what the Pine Ridge side of the White River holds, in terms of sedimentary deposits, and ages? Until then, I’ll comfort myself with the words of Michael Polanyi who wrote about science and art (“The Creative Imagination”): But to know what to look for does not lead us to the power to find it. That power lies in the imagination.

80′ Dinosaur (Wall SD)

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

I’ve been reading paleontologist Jack Horner’s new book, “How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction doesn’t have to be forever.” His ideas emerge from his work in the Hell Creek Formation (Montana’s Badlands); Horner is convinced that we can reverse-engineer a dinosaur by tweaking the DNA in a chicken embryo. I find it is difficult to imagine a dinosaur (one reviewer of Horner’s book is dubbing it “chickenosaurus”) really existing in our world, conceptually. Will it be one giant leap forward for the dinosaur, one giant leap backward for humankind? Nature, tooth and claw….

Dreams of the fierce modern McNuggetosaurus notwithstanding, I’m starting to make a list of the places I want to see in May, when I drive out to Oregon — petroglyphs, fossil sites, even a remote spot in Wyoming where dinosaur footprints were found, preserved in siltstone! Tonight I dug out a few of my childhood dinosaur books, and scanned some of their covers. Here’s my favorite — depicting the T-Rex and the Woolly Mammoth coexisting!

Can you say anachronism?

Postscript for potential children’s book authors: dinosaurs ruled the world of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods — until their sudden mass extinction, which was probably triggered by a bolide hitting the earth. This is called the Cretaceous–Tertiary (or Cretaceous–Paleogene) extinction event. In many places, the “K-T boundary” is a clearly visible line in the earth’s rocks. Before K-T: dinosaurs. After K-T: no more dinosaurs. By comparison, Woolly Mammoths and their tusked evolutionary ancestors evolved AFTER the K-T extinction event….. Woolly Mammoths are found in the fossil record from about 150 thousand years ago, until perhaps 10 thousand years ago.