What I found most interesting about the Badlands is that they just appear. One moment, you are driving through miles and miles of gently rolling plains, and suddenly you are in the Badlands. No gradual topography changes.

The Badlands are fascinating formations - I'm reluctant to call them mountains - created over hundreds of thousands of years of erosion. The layers of rock were laid down over millions of years, and are slowly exposed as softer layers erode.

I found the banded layers interesting, with many formations having periodic reddish bands between the layers of gray rock.

The park is also a hotbed of fossils, having spent time under a shallow sea millions of years ago.