Travelogues
2007 Summer Trip

Friday, July 23

And the Winds Blew and Blew and Blew

The forecasters were exactly correct. They predicted it would be windy all day, and it has been windy all day. We even had some rain in the wee hours of the morning. I'm sure a more dedicated photographer would have gone out and shot in the wind, but I wasn't that dedicated.

After lunch, we drove over to the Cedar Pass Lodge and the Visitor Center. The most interesting thing in the Visitor Center was the working lab where paleontologists were cleaning up fossils that were extracted in the park. Watching them work with infinite patience as they cleaned the minutest bits of limestone away from the fossils was amazing. The lab included a story about a young girl who found an important fossil as a part of the Junior Ranger Program. Her father was a geologist, so she had some background on recognizing fossils. Her father had done some research in the area, and he wanted to show his family where he had been. The little girl signed up for the Junior Ranger Program, and while she was doing one of the activities, she discovered a part of a skull of what was later identified as a saber-tooth tiger fossil.

The wind finally died down about 6:00, so I decided to see what I could find to photograph. The first stop was the balanced rock at the foot of Dillon Pass. Badlands National Park doesn't have strange and intricate hoodoos like the Bisti or Ah-shi-sle-pah badlands we visited last year in New Mexico. The badlands here are more like eroded ridges with serrated tops or sharp-pointed pyramids. The balanced rock is the only formation in Badlands that has any similarity to what we've seen in other badlands areas.

Balanced Rock

I made a couple more stops trying to find other landscape shots, but the flat light and lack of clouds prevented me from finding anything interesting.

Shortly after I passed the White River Valley Overlook, I saw two rams walking along the road. I found a place to pull off the road and worked my way ahead of them so they would be walking toward me with the sun in their faces. They were completely intent on walking right along the side of the road, so by the time they reached me, they were within about 6 feet of me. My long lens was almost too long, and I took only head shots at 100 mm zoom. Each time the rams would pass me, I'd circle ahead of them again and set up all over again. Those are the easiest head shots of bighorn I'll ever get. After we'd played hop scotch for about 1/2 mile, I walked back to the Explorer and continued up the road until I spotted them feeding at the edge of the canyon. I pulled off again and hiked over to shoot them in a more natural setting than along the road.

Bighorn Sheep Ram Bighorn Sheep Ram

The next stop was the never-fail area; Quinn Road and the prairie dogs. I'm a known commodity there, and the prairie dogs simply ignore me. They continue feeding and often will come within a couple of feet of me as I'm shooting. At one point, I walked away from my normal shooting area and two other cars parked to watch the prairie dogs. The prairie dogs immediately vanished and didn't come back out until I had returned and they saw that I was the only one there. That certainly makes it a lot easier to photograph them. I even caught one of the prairie dogs right in front of me doing a triple pop-up just before sunset.

When I drove back toward camp after sunset, I noticed a photographer shooting one of the main formations. Even though it was after sunset, the formation seemed to have a soft glow as if the sunset light was being reflected off the sky and onto the formation.

Badlands Badlands