Everybody knows about the Castles in Harding County — they are a designated National Natural Landmark — but what about Window Rock? If landforms is what you're after, the South Dakota units of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest has got 'em.
There are medieval castles and tufted hoodoos, grassy plateau islands adrift in desert seas, bulbous earth mounds pushed up from under and pierced through by jagged landwarts.
Then, rising from a valley surrounded by these wonders there's South Dakota's own, sandstone Ziggurat of Ur, except less accessible than Iraq's, which according to Google Maps is just a thirty minute drive from the Nasiriyah Mega Mall.
Ours was built by nature not Ur-Nammu, but both have made lasting contributions to the order of how it all goes down (capital punishment — still a thing). The Mesopotamian ziggurats were a kind of proto-Brutalist architecture in their sheer hermeticity, imposing and terrifying like the Buffalo City Court building (Buffalo, New York not South Dakota). Whatever openings existed on the upper terraces — probably temples which have been lost to time — must have held heavy visual significance.
The window appears to have been sculpted by metaphysical forces. Geologists say wind and water are the sculptors of landforms (to which others may reply same difference). Wind and rain flagellated our ziggurat over eons, washing streamlets of sediment into the creek below. More water hunkered in the cavities created, froze in winter, and expanded fractures in the sandstone, breaking away layers until the window was gradually opened.
Was the window in the very DNA of our ziggurat, waiting for nature to draw the curtain? Jiri Bruthans, a hydrogeologist at in the Czech Republic researched the role played in arch-formation by pre-existing stress fields in sandstone, created by downward pressure. His team found that as parts of a sandstone structure under low stress erode, stress increases on remaining load-bearing portions, making them stronger, more erosion-resistant. “Erosion gets material out, but doesn’t make the shape,” Bruthans told Nature. The forms the sandstone eventually takes are innate.
The window was always a window. There was just some lag time between the geomorphological affirmation of its window-ness and the construction of our ziggurat.
At sunrise, Window Rock's pale naked sandstone sponges hues filtered through the golden grasses and pink and purplish fog puffs slowly ascending over the valley. As the seasons change and light flickers through green grass and cottonwood leaves, blossoms of echinacea and sunflower and prickly pear, the colors will brighten like the belly of a meadowlark as it creeps up on little larkmaking age.
The window in Window Rock functions differently as a window. As our species is groomed for a boxed, sunless existence, we feign an escape into small windows. Held close to the face, they fill our field of vision while narrowing its focus, diminishing our inner worlds enough to make our physical cubbyholes suffice — like staring through a telescope at a globular cheese puff and calling it Venus. Our sightlines could be drawn as two cones joined at the base.
The Window works inversely — the cones are stacked at the vertices. We can't press our faces to the paneless fissure in the Rock. You can stand at a distance in the magnitude of this strange, brutal place and your unconfinement will catapult you through the passage right back into holy bigness.
To get to Window Rock, you take SD 20 to Forest Service Road 3124 (it shows up on Google Maps as North End Road), less than half a mile East of the Reva Gap Campground and views of the Castles. FS-3124 winds steeply and bumpily upward through ponderosa pine forest. The route is muddy now, but even when it dries out I wouldn't try it in anything not a high-clearance four-wheel drive. You could also park and walk about five miles, it's worth it.
You'll reach a high prairie that drops steeply to the southwest, and know Window Rock when you see it. I parked at 45.57270, -103.20853. From anywhere in that general area you can weave your own path (about a mile) down and over grassy hills stippled with juniper, stepped terraces and naked mounds of soil crusted with ashy layers of alkali.
A silty talus slope at the base of the east-facing wall seems impassable. There is no elongated stairway to the upper chambers of our ziggurat, even for priests. You can find ways to scramble to near the top, but I shouldn't recommend it. The Rock is at 45.56671, -103.21664.
This article was originally published in April of 2020.