The Badlands and Mount Rushmore

Deposition and erosion, these are the key factors of how the Badlands came to exist as we know them today. In a period of 35 million years and stretching between two geologic epochs, the late Cretaceous and Eocene, grains of eroded mountains began compacting together into what we call sedimentary rocks. Millions of years of different environments' tropical jungles, oceans, and open woodlands with meandering rivers all caused different sediments to accumulate at different rates and different times.

Layers that have similar compositions are called formations. The oldest formations are at the bottom, and the youngest are at the top. The layers are a geologic clock that can show events frozen in time. The light colored formation known as the Sharps Formation was deposited 30 million years ago by wind and water as the climate was dry and cool. A thick layer of volcanic ash is known as Rockyford Ash and forms the bottom layer of the Sharps Formation. The brown-colored sections are known as the Brule Formation and are a few million years older. They marked a time when a vast forest was transitioning to open savannah.

A greyish-colored Chadron Formation marks a period when flooded rivers dumped sediments on the region with fossils of alligator pre-nasalis, an extinct alligator whose fossil was found in the sediments of the area measuring and megacorps a massive three toed rhinoceros eight feet tall and sixteen feet long. Sabertooth Cat was found in this formation as well.

A blackish grey sedimentary rock is near the bottom and signals the presence of a North American Inland Sea. Known as the Pierre Shale, this layer is a tremendous source of marine fossils from nearly 75 million years ago. A variety of fossilized creatures have been found in this formation from sea creatures that sank to the bottom of the ocean when they died, such as cephalopods, clams, crabs, snails, fish, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, archelon, and hesperornis. The badlands began an erosion process approximately 500,000 years ago when the Cheyenne River captured streams and rivers flowing from the black hills straight into the region.

The river network acted like a knife, cutting quickly on a geologic time frame cutting the steep flakey buttes we see today. Erosion from the rain and wind are the main driving factors today, as they account for a 1-inch erosion rate per year. At the present rate, it took 500,000 years to begin the process and in another 500,000 this 35 million year snapshot of the geologic and biologic timeline will be worn down completely and flat again.

This was a hunting ground by Paleoamerican cultures since roughly 11,000 years by Lakota and Sioux nations, Paleo Indians who made their way in from the north crossing the Bering land bridge, and the Arikara Tribe, who had been decimated by smallpox in the late eighteenth century. The Lakota were the first to call this place mako sica or land bad. Extreme climate and rugged terrain led to the name. French Canadian trappers called it ls mauvais terres pour traverse, or bad lands to travel through. The place is absolutely silent in its deep winter freeze, a mysterious landscape of ethereal spires, a built environment created out of the earth by the forces of the earth itself.

The scale of the landscape messes with your sense of perspective, and it was an experience I wasn't ready for. In photographs, I always assumed that the formations were more like limestone or pumice that could flake off in your hands but initially solid like a rock. Walking into the first cuts of the earth, I put my hands out to balance myself in the tight trench trail. My feet were struggling within a heavy set of ill-fitting steel-toed work boots packed with radiant barrier insulation to combat numbing in the subzero weather.

The dryness and altitude were playing tricks on the skin as I wanted to shed layers and walk around in my thermal shirt underlayer despite the dim diffuse overcast light at noon, the lack of shadows in the scattered specular light.

It was all surface wrapping and rising and falling but without shape because of perfectly even light and no shadow to define form, absolutely flat. I put my hand out on what I thought was a rock and the surface crumbled right in front of my eyes, like a wasp or mud dauber nest, just a collection of sods compacted by time. I looked behind me and saw the trails my feet made skidding a groove in the trail, I thought of how the rains and wind would sweep up the mess I made later. In my bulky winter clothing I raised my head up a little further to account for the flopping winter cap obstructing my vision, I looked up at the car before rounding the corner to see it as a tiny dot surrounded by the sodded spires. How long have I been walking? I rounded the corner before losing visual contact with the car, the lifeline on this trip, running with the heater shielding us from the brutality of the cold, sputtering idle with my wife and son inside watching saved Netflix episodes and eating dehydrated chicken salad; a farewell to a line of sight and my lifeline.

I started walking up the cut for a little bit, the grade of the hike getting significantly steeper. The wind was non-existent, the yellow-white sky was obstructed by massive brown spires, all with pigments of grey, yellow, rust, and brown. The perspective warped further as the spires rose up around me higher and higher as my outstretched arms could still feel the edges of the cut in the earth. I marched the incline wrapping around and around, winding through the half a million year cut of wind and glacial melt, I stopped thinking about the mess I was making of this whole path, the wind and water did far more than I did. Shapes became color, I stopped seeing form and began to perceive the space in color field, the browns in the rock mixed to an average, flat like the surface of an Ad Reinhardt painting.

The sky with no definition was partly shielded by my squinting eyes, every time I tried to take a photograph the contact lens in my open eye began to freeze stiff causing me to tear up and then freeze along my eyelid and cheek. It had flat and clipped quality, the dynamic range of the environment was compressed to a color field that I can still bring up in my memory. It's not a flat plain like the Reinhardt that you would spend minutes gazing upon at a museum, rather if the painting was stereoscopic, processed as visually recorded by the eyes, climatically recorded by the skin, and audibly recorded by the ears; three tracks of data recorded, mixed, and mastered by the brain. It's in there now, it's as real as ever after writing this eleven months later, and I feel as if it is encoded on an ancient and deep-wired part of the brain, designed to keep us alive during a time that the cut I was walking was nonexistent.

A static scene of brown and white was mapped. I sensed a movement break the silence of the scene. It was an arch of brown just above my head, I would have to tilt my neck upward slightly to center it in my frame of view. The static map of brown was an average of reddish hematite pigment, the movement was an arch that took me back to my childhood, exactly Marco's age to driving around in the back seat of my mom's car at the time, the 1982 Oldsmobile cutlass supreme with a velvet light sandstone interior. The texture grated on my nerves I remembered, and the thought of chewing on it would make me involuntary shiver. It was a sharp distinction of browns that had broken the white background in complete silence that had me stop with a clear thought of what it was, in all probability a Mountain Lion.

In my stupid bulky shoes and clothing, I attempted to walk the decline backward making sure I did not show the cat the back of my head and a free lunch. I took off my glove and cupped my five and a half pound Pentax 67 like a solid steel club as I quietly walked backward a good mile or so. I kept the static red ochre and yellowish white map in my mind as I walked back, finally turning my back to the path, seeing the black car dot the landscape in the way a period dots an empty page. I lightly jogged to the car as my hand stung with the pain of the cold. I grabbed the door latch and got into a heated car with lovely warm seats and my family watching cartoons and eating chicken salad.

"You'll never guess what happened to me," I said...

"Huh, what?" My wife said without looking up, scrolling through Instagram.

I turned around to check on Marco, he was chilling in his car seat watching an episode of Masha, and the Bear saved on the tablet. Fuck my hand began to sting.

Mt Rushmore

From the warmth of our Rapid City hotel, booked for $30 on the Hotels dot com mobile app, we sat in front of our continental breakfast: Juice and Oatmeal for Marco, cups of watery coffee for us as we shared one of those waffles from the waffle iron setup that produces a chewy springy Belgian? Style waffle that was far too instant to be Belgian. No taste other than sweet, salt and warm, good enough for me.

I checked the weather, we had to get south that day. A system was coming in and the nine degrees fahrenheit below zero temperature outside might as well been Miami Beach this evening with heavy snow, wind, and a temperature drop to -40f. I wanted to do the whole tourist trap, the Black Hills drive, Mt Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and the journey into Wyoming to see Devils Tower. The weather forced us to choose only the closest attraction, Mt Rushmore. It seemed appropriate, as that's what every tourist was there to see. We could hear family travelers talk about the experience, as I chewed my piece of waffle, I was eavesdropping the others in the dining area snippets of conversation as I was waking up.

"It was underwhelming..."

"Yeah, you might as well go do it. You'll get in and out and be in Cheyenne by nightfall..."

"You know, I thought it was going to be bigger..."

Other tourists remarked like it was the jaded memory of a first sexual encounter. Could it be that bad? The black hills were a holy land to the original inhabitants before European assimilation. The Lakota, Cheyenne, and Omaha believed that they came from a cave that was located in the black hills. The Lakota called the black hills Paha Sapa, or "the heart of everything that is." a Lakota medicine man explains, " We have a spiritual connection to the Black Hills that can't be sold. I don't think I could face the creator with an open heart if I ever took money for it."

A fascinating place to blast four european likenesses into one of their mountains with dynamite. It becomes a fitting backdrop for Baby boomer excursions and millennial DSLR video exposés alike. Seems quite tacky to realize, to document, and to reflect upon. I would say it is even a healthy experience to test your own fallacies in what type of person you are by realizing you are a gaping hypocrite who's shit stinks as bad and exposed pig shit effluent lagoon we passed in western Kansas. You are an onlooker of a freeway accident driving by slowly watching the carnage detached, listening to your favorite jam in the safety of your own vehicle. Enjoy it, because it wasn't you.

Driving up the monument in the winter we encountered a town complete with a gas station with only credit card payment access. A touristy downtown all boarded up for the winter. It was off season and was abandoned until warmer climates prevailed. We parked in a cavernous covered parking lot, something rivaling a movie megaplex parking garage or a nuclear missile silo. It was full of excursion vans and rental cars. The snow sprinkled in from the opening above, we were about three stories below ground level. The chemical salt had melted the crunchy glassy ice into synthetic salt water, immediately soaking our boots and woolen socks despite the below zero temperature. We bundled Marco up and drug him out into the cold for the first real extended period without shelter. We were all soaked and miserable. We walked up the stairs onto the Esplanade, the only show in town.

Brutalist faux granite columns line the walkway with the 50 state flags. The flags are arranged in alphabetical order with the A's starting as you enter near the bathroom where I dried my son's frozen socks and boots, with the W's nearest the visitor center, gift shop, and the reason why we came.

The four visitor's heads are blown into the eternity of solid granite. Included with the 50 state flags are the flags of our nation's nonstate districts, commonwealths, and territories. District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, The Virgin Islands, and The Northern Mariana Islands. Walking to the end of the avenue, you encounter the monument and a township of tourists all taking selfies and drinking Starbucks coffee. Excellent! I'm gonna get some of that in a bit, I'm freezing my ass off. Marco screaming bloody murder because he had not learned to keep his gloves on and Jenny Lynn retreated to the gift shop to warm up. I was let to walk the balcony overlooking the empty amphitheater below and the monument. Getting closer was prohibited in the weather and was forced to sit, watch, listen, and document the scene from the tourist herd.

"You know, he probably has the money to carve his face next to them," I heard.

"Yeah, he probably does and probably will, because we would let him get away with it."

Tourists from everywhere on the planet lined up to take selfies in front of this mangled accident. The rubble at the base of the mountain was the trash the laborers failed to pick up at the end of the project when it ran out of funding and were not paid their final severance. That detail gave me some solace, that and later when I stopped to look at it from a mile away to realize how small it was. Yeah, we got fucked, but it was the micro whiskey dick kinda fucking, the kinda fucking we are used to.

I took my pictures and helped others with family phone pics. It will be a perpetual reminder of how small and insignificant the project of empire indeed is. For when the Badlands are entirely worn away, the granite of Mt Rushmore will still stand tall as it is probably some of the oldest rock formations on the planet taking something like two billion years to form. The erosion rates of this rock are one inch per ten thousand years. If left alone it would be probable to see the likenesses of four pale faces in a distant future when the entirety of The Badlands would be worn smooth. The forces of water expansion and contraction could erode the artificial faces much faster if it weren't for the work of park workers squirting silicone caulking into the cracks preventing the forces of frost wedging. They are doing the job of gothic freemasons, who only stopped during periods of state default. I did my part to keep it all going, I paid for parking, took my pictures, drank my coffee, and got my son a toy truck from the gift shop.

A denser snow started to fall outside. As I was paying for the toy 18 wheeler, I noted that to the cashier, and she stopped for a moment, turning briefly then going back to her work saying half pensively, yeah, I gotta be here until 7pm, then I gotta drive home in it?

"Where?" I said.

"Spearfish, it's right around Sturgis, where they do the motorcycle rally, Its a real pain in the butt to drive in the snow."

Wonder how all us tourists are going to handle the drive out of here, seems like there a lot of people around here who haven't driven this type of cold or snow before?

She laughed. "Get out now," she said.

I'm going, I'm going. Be safe,

You too.