Wait! It’s too soon! — I’ve got another day! but yes, I know….

Neighboring staff with contracts that ended on April 1 are moving out today, and others are moving in. As I begin to pack my belongings, I’m replaying brilliant and sublime moments from this past month in the Badlands. Erosion. Weather Geology. Solitude. It truly has been a spectacular and diverse time to be here, a real blessing. Doing some laundry today, I picked up a book called “Battling For The National Parks” by George B. Hartzog with an intro by the late Stewart Udall. I should explain that the laundry room has bookshelves for swapping reading materials (lots of mysteries!). In Chapter I, Hartzog is jotting down his early experiences and impressions as Director of the National Park Service. Hippies want access for large meadow-sit-ins. Conservation clubs are running utility lines through park meadows. A decision to open locked gates to back roads in the Great Smokies brings nothing but criticism. Everybody seems to want something different. Meanwhile, human rights marchers have set up great encampments on the (Park Service administered) Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Again and again, Hartzog must ask himself “Whose parks are these?” How do you manage so many different parks for the “public” when the public has so many faces and opinions? He includes this paragraph:

A mother in Detroit wrote to tell me of the joyous two-week vacation she, her husband and two children had in the national parks. They had tent-camped, she wrote, in ten parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite. She was complimentary of the rangers they had met, the clean campgrounds and the good roads. My road atlas indicated that the two-week trip must have involved at least 5,000 miles. They wind-shielded a lot of scenery.

I enjoyed that passage so much, wind-shielding, as it reminded me of the joy of those long “see it all” car trips we took when I was a kid, chalking up as many parks as possible, although our method feels so wrong in retrospect. By comparison, I’ve driven 800 miles in past month — but just within the Badlands.

It’s a wide park, stretched out like a bison, grazing downhill, and I really wanted to familiarize myself with as much terrain as possible (since the geology varies so wildly from location to location). Thought I’d share my visualization of the park map, as overlaid with a bison. North Unit of the Badlands (experienced by most visitors) is upper corner. Back-tail-hind-legs. You can see the Loop Road runs up the hind leg (and if the tail were lifted, it would point at Wall). The South Unit, which is large and wild and difficult to experience fully, is located in the bison’s great shaggy head-horns-shoulders-front-legs.

For the past couple days I’ve been crafting and revising drafts of poems, re-reading my scribbled notes, and printing copies as the words begin to gel. Part of my own creative process involves making watercolor landscape sketches.   Here are those sketches, as a Flickr slideshow.

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If you’re a plant in the Badlands, the first thing you need to do each spring is tunnel up through new sediments! (this stuff can be about as soft as poured cement when it hardens). But as it dries, the claypan cracks, and the spring perennials are forcing up through these gaps. Pretty incredible to witness. The green spears must be in the Allium family, because I pinched a bit and they taste/smell like chives. I believe the other plant, developing yellow/ruddy buds, is a “fetid marigold.” Doesn’t stink yet!

The trees are budding out, and the lawns appear 80% green today (without squinting or using a magnifying glass).  Further afield, the sod tables still appear to be a dozen hues of winter-beige, but this is only because they are covered with long dry grasses that conceal all the subtle greening happening below.

It will be hard to leave this heady dose of spring and return to Upper Michigan (although it has been warm there, too, and the ice melted early):  along the shoreline of Lake Superior, our lilacs won’t be blossoming until mid June.  Until Friday, at least, I’m loving the sight of buds…..

Another liquid-amber sunset flickering like a grassfire over the Badlands! These pics are taken from my “home-away-from-home” in the Badlands, the park housing unit tucked behind the Visitor Center. Hard to imagine getting “used” to spectacular scenes like this! What happens? — you say “another stellar sunset? Nah, I’ll pass.” — ??

In photo #4, the gold hour is over (as suddenly as it began) but the sky continued unfolding layers of frosting and cloud-fronds in an extended after-glow show.

Comparing two aerial images from the Badlands, viewed via GoogleMap. One is a bombing target carved into the earth by the military (the bottom portion of the target is less visible, so it may be grazed now, and if so, I am guessing there is a cattle-fence running through the center of the old target). The other location is a Sundance (ceremonial) site. Sacred and Profane; within field-glass view of each other.  It is hard to shift our perspectives.  Try walking around all day looking at the world through a magnifying glass.  The fact that we can see our daily terrain from the perspective of plane-photos and satellite imagery is really a major paradigm-shift. Here is an aerial view of the Minuteman Missile Silo I visited, just north of the Badlands…. and the aerial view of a Badlands prairie dog town. I am really amazed that all of these patterns are so strikingly visible at such distances.

Vernal pool at Cactus Flats was a chorus of spring peepers this morning! Good fer what ails ya!

Sorry for the wind sounds on this file. If it annoys you too much, there are two shorter clips that also feature peepers — sans wind. (Posted to my Flickr account). Make sure you have your sound on!

These peepers are making me homesick for a certain husband, and a certain pond on the Yellow Dog Plains of Upper Michigan, but I’ll be back home soon-very-soon.

The sun illuminates the sediment layers, the wind and water carve them into sensual formations. I let the wind and sun (70s today!) and a stream of visitors grit-scour all dark thoughts of “The Day After” from my mind. The landscape sweeps out our cobwebs.

As the late Stewart Udall once wrote:

“By a fascinating irony, what we have called in the past the “badlands” turn out to be good lands, and very good lands indeed. I like to tell the story that is related by one of the Utah historians whose grandparents came across some of the desolate southern Utah country with which Powell was so familiar. In those days water was so scarce and the weather so harsh that the people referred to this arid country as “the land God forgot.” This historian writes that now, 100 years later, we see that it was indeed the land “God saved for Himself.”

The sense of scale at Big Badlands Overlook is pretty stunning, both in the long view down into the White River valley and lower grasslands, and in the sheer drop of the eroding wall itself, prairie to thousand-foot tumble in just a few steps.  This photo shows just a tiny bit of the scene, like a sliver of apple, as one is looking back from the jutting overlook platform.  But I love the reference-point of my truck in the upper corner, insignificant as an ant.

Just north of the Badlands, at Cactus Flats, there is a small National Historic Site dedicated to an unsettling reminder of the Cold War: missile silos. In South Dakota alone, there were 150 nuclear-tipped Minuteman Missile silos “planted” in ranchlands, ready to strike targets in the Soviet Union after a short 30-minute flight over the North Pole.

Several of these sites (Delta and Bravo units — each with a Launch Facility and 10 missile silos) were just north of the Badlands’s boundary. There isn’t a real “Visitor Center” yet, but that will soon be built. Tours start with a short movie, providing history and context regarding the Cold War, then everyone proceeds up the interstate — first to the Delta Launch Control Facility, which can easily be viewed from I-90 if you know what you are looking for, and ultimately to a missile silo further west. Yes, there really is a sign at the bottom of that exit ramp now, reading

<— MISSILE SILO

Although buried, the silos were never exactly “hidden” but for most citizens I think the adage “out of sight out of mind” applies. Who wanted to think about nuclear annihilation? Thankfully, the Minutemen Missiles were deactivated as part of the START treaty. In most cases, it seems that the military removed the missile and dynamited the silo facility before returning these imploded sites to ranch-owners with long lists of prohibited uses (limited reusability). Through Minutemen Missile NHS, visitors can see the one silo that has been preserved in situ, like a terrible fossil worm, with the warhead removed, some internal parts filled with cement and components of the launching mechanisms welded together, rendering them “dead” but plenty realistic. It is also a powerful experience to stand in the underground control center, which is like a buried spaceship, where two men would have needed to insert their two keys simultaneously, to activate the launch sequence….

This interesting-but-eerie site, a shrine to our collective cold-war angst, is located spitting distance from the interstate, with the menacing teeth of the Pinnacles visible in the distance.

For more information, including a movie, panoramic photographs of rarely-seen sites, history and maps of minuteman missile silo locations, see: Minuteman Missile National Historic Site
http://www.nps.gov/mimi/index.htm

A Remembrance: Three Who Helped to Shape the West – Bay Area Blog – NYTimes.com.

In recent weeks, the West lost three men who helped to shape it: Edgar Wayburn,a past president of the Sierra Club, Stewart L. Udall, who was the interior secretary in the 1960s, and Charles Muscatine, a Chaucer scholar who was among the University of California, Berkeley professors fired after they refused, in 1949, to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath.

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 believe the actual date of the full moon is tomorrow, but it sure looked full tonight, floating east of Millard Ridge. There was a lavender layer of haze along the horizon, which the moon is just clearing in this shot.