from above you have a good view
checking out our car
in the afternoon we witness a performance by the locals
Badlands National Park
When you travel west on the I-90 past the Missouri River the flat prairy landscape sudddenly changes in a heavily eroded terrain with peaks, gullies, buttes and strangely shaped pinnacles. 
 
These are the Badlands, a translation
of Mako Sica, the name the Lakota give it when they forcefully drove out  the Arikara in the 18th century. 
A century later european homesteaders, supported by the US government, took most of the territory from the Lakota, who were put in ever smaller reservations.
 
Around 1890 a religious movement grew that believed that the white men would disappear and buffalo would return if every Indian practiced the Ghost Dance.
It all ended tragically with the massacre at Wounded Knee, a creek 70 km south of the Badlands National Park. 
 
Long time ago the area was an inland sea as can be seen from several colored layers of sediments. Over time water, wind and ash from  volcanic eruptions in the Rocky Mountains sculpted the Badlands into its present form. And the erosion continues.
 
We visited the Badlands National Park in August 1992.
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we booked a helicopter to see the Badlands from above
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this is how it looks like through a dirty windshield
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you can take a hike to see the pinnacles up close
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the different sediment layers are clearly visible
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