The Badlands aren’t so bad after all
On my way across the country, I rode 3,100 miles and passed through 14 states and four time zones.
Ever since I saw photos of it in a magazine back in the 1980s, I have been dying to visit Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
Before white settlement, the Lakota Sioux called the two small mountain ranges in what is now western South Dakota the White Hills and the Black Hills.
The Black Hills are still called that. It’s where Mount Rushmore is located.
French trappers took to calling the White Hills “bad lands” because there was almost no wildlife and the rugged hills were incredibly difficult to traverse. Eventually, the Lakota Sioux adopted the name as well. By the time other whites came to the area, the name was cemented and we now just call them the Badlands.
