This article begins a series about my personal favorite national parks.  I say personal because these are not the most popular, most scenic, or biggest.  But they are some of my favorites.  This started as one article but I quickly realized that it deserves a series.  I’ll start with Badlands National Park.

Badlands National Park

My personal favorite national park is Badlands.  Badlands National Park is located in the western half of South Dakota.  The park is an almost alien landscape of geological formations.  You really must walk among the rugged formations to appreciate what this park has to offer.  Many people have never even heard of Badlands but I said this is my “personal” favorite.  I’ll explore why.

Below are some excerpts from my post “Funny Long Trip Stories.” 

My wife and I had been married a short time.  I had done several camping road trips with my family.  My wife had very limited camping experience.  For the first time my job allowed me three week’s vacation and on a whim I got the idea of a cross country road trip.  Surprisingly my wife agreed.

The first few nights were uneventful.  We stayed at campgrounds in Indiana and Iowa.  We were so exhausted after driving 12 hours we barely could set up the tent, eat some canned food, and collapse into our sleeping bags.  By the middle of the third day we reached our first real destination of Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

We stayed at the KOA campground in Interior, SD, just outside the park boundary.  We set up camp right along the river with the car parked under a big tree about 50 feet from our tent.  Overall it was a perfect setting.  More canned food for dinner, and we were tired but more relaxed because we were finally somewhere where we planned on staying a couple days.

We were tired from our very busy day and fell asleep quickly in our big roomy umbrella tent.  Around 1:00AM my wife woke me concerned about an approaching thunderstorm.  I assured her I had camped through lots of thunderstorms and that we should just go back to sleep.  I carefully closed and zippered all the tent flaps to protect from the expected rain.

A few minutes later all hell broke loose!  A huge gust of wind came from nowhere and brought the tent down on top of us.  Howling wind and pounding rain were mixed with screams all around the campground.  We were all tangled up in the tent that I had just fastened up so securely!  When I finally found the door and managed to undo the double zipper I was greeted with what seemed like pure white light from the continuous lightning!

We dashed in our gym shorts to the car though wind, downpouring rain and 1 inch hail.  The hail felt like rocks hitting us.  Our perfect sandy campsite turned to pure mud and by the time we got to the car we were soaked and covered in mud.

Right about that time I realized all the money we had in the world was still in my pants pocket in the tent!.  And the last time I saw the tent it was blowing in the wind wrapped around a tree.  So out of the safety of the car I went.  I did retrieve the money but at the price of multiple hailstone strikes.  Back in the car we took stock.  My head was bleeding from a hail stone strike and we both had welts from other strikes in the short dash to the car.  We slept in the front seats of our Ford Tempo that night as the rain continued but the wind and hail subsided.

We woke at 6:00 AM to a beautiful sunny day as often happens after storms.  I was afraid my wife would want to make a beeline for home, but she never even considered it.  It was time to take stock and assess the damage.  Everything was wet but a couple hours with the campground laundry’s dryer fixed that.  The tent looked terrible but as we untangled it we found nothing was broken, just muddy and wet, so we cleaned it up and set it back up so it could dry. 

We have told this story a hundred times and amazingly it is one of our favorite memories.  Funny how that works – a disaster in the present sometimes becomes a cherished memory in the future.

And so Badlands has become one of our favorite parks.  We live outside Philadelphia Pennsylvania and have taken quite a few cross country road trips.  Badlands is often one of our first stops.  We have it timed so that after a couple long days of driving we can make it there around lunch time on the third day.

We have many more stories, including getting knocked flat a second time, and a couple of rattlesnake stories.  And there are so many other great places to visit in the general vicinity of Badlands.  They will have to wait for a later post.

As I’m writing this is early summer 2022 we considered a quick trip to Badlands but ran into issues getting reservations anywhere in the area.  As the pandemic is easing a little I guess the whole country is hitting the road.  So we’ll postpone until things are a