Badlands National Park

Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota is 60 miles east of Rapid City. Established as a national monument in 1929, it was made a national park in 1978. The park covers an area of 242,756 acres in an arid region between the White and Cheyenne rivers. Stacked layers of soft sedimentary rock, deposited during the Tertiary Period of geologic history, have been eroded into a varied landscape of gullies, spires, pinnacles, canyons, and ridges. These colorful sandstone and shale beds contain rich fossils of extinct species that lived millions of years ago in a wet, marshy environment.