In South Dakota you can social distance outside. There's no Times Square out there. And the distances are greater.
Inside maybe be safer but it can become a prison, a dungeon with a tiny window installed by Apple or Samsung. That window is where you find us, and we are rowdy house guests.
And, South Dakota is home to the badlands. The Badlands. There is no place as unconfined.
The badlands are earth scarified. Take a painting of a quaint English countryside: yellow it with age, let prairie dogs gnaw at it, sic a deranged, elder Elvis with a .357 on it. Then auction it at Sothesby's for twice the net worth of your entire ancestral line laid out Old Testament style. That's the Badlands — as vehement a negation as exists of the norms of pastoral beauty.



The arthritic way it articulates its lines is the ringtone that sparks the osteo-telepathy between your bones and the fossilized mesohippus buried in sedimentary sherbet mounds that surround you. It's a place where spectral, ancient, tiny horses can drag you away.
The badlands is an affliction on the land — it's the geological scar tissue acquired by our planet through eons of hard living.
By entering this welted, furrowed scarified earth, you hike yourself into deep time, a place where the bone/obelisk has fallen back to earth, stands weathered at the waistline, tufted with a prickly pear toupee. This is where your old soul becomes a paleosoul among paleosols.
Here upheavals, extinctions and eruptions, depositions and erosion coalesce into a bigger picture. Think of your life as a striated color sequence. Mine can be mapped out as moments of dazzlingly stratospheric stupidity, sandwiched between drab layers of cowardly torpor.
Geologists have identified some of the thinner bands in the Badlands formations as volcanic tuffs — thin, quickly-accumulated layers of volcanic ash that visually pop among the more slowly-gathered layers of sediment. If you could present the human story as a dirt tableau — one person, one granule — don't we all want to be part of that volcanic tuff? Of course we do. We want to be a firework, to let our colors burst.
Now zoom back out of deep time into your own life, and you can see the bands where you bled, cause they're tinged with deep hues from all the heme. That's your volcanic tuff.
The Conata Basin is a grassy bay between the main Badlands wall, and an intersecting ridgeline that branches South and east. By night, black-footed ferrets, back from near-extinction, hunt prairie dogs. So do rattlesnakes, owls, fox and coyote. At the Conata Picnic Area you can park and hike around in the basin, or up into the high country.
From here, there are drainages you can follow Northeasterly into a narrow canyon where you can climb up to the very edge of the wall, and peep at Badlands loop road snaking through the Yellow Mounds below. Then you can climb back down an explore an off-road world, seldom-seen, car-free.




At the end of the little cul-de-sac in the Conata Picnic Area there's a sign with a blurb about a place called Deer Haven, a juniper forest plateau along the ridgeline above Conata Basin.
There is no marked trail. The easiest way to get there is to walk southeast, then east along the edge of the ridgeline. You'll find a well-worn game/ human path that peters out at a cut in a dome formation (43.83548, -102.23219). As soon as you round this dome and face to the North, Deer Haven is spread out before you.
There are many deer trails through a patch of thick brush, and at least one doable pass up onto the plateau. As a public service announcement, your SDPB Outdoors correspondent should mention here that as with much off-trail — and some on-trail — Badlands exploration, making this ascent involves some hands-and-feet scrambling. Please proceed with caution, and know that you can also access beautiful views from the low country.

As you walk towards Deer Haven, you'll notice a distinctive hole, that may be a portal to another dimension, high along the ridgeline to the West.
Archaeologist Linea Sundstrom has written about what she calls a "cross-cultural transference of the sacred geography" in regards to the Black Hills, meaning that beliefs in the sacral nature of particular places were transferred among different groups of people over time. I'm not an archaeologist but I do believe that's a fine way of thinking — not that you have to appropriate other peoples' cultures, but that I can accept that a place you say is sacred is sacred, and then perceive it as such, in a consecrated manner. And that we can extend this even to deer, who clearly sacralized this place before somebody at the NPS thought of putting up a sign in the cul-de-sac. If you go, you'll understand.
The hike: From the Conata Basin Picnic Area, hiking to Deer Haven (zen point, 43.84315, -102.23731), around a bit and back was about 6.8 miles. For some more difficult scrambling, you can climb up into the bluff country at the intersecting walls, and maybe peer over the main Wall down onto the Yellow Mounds.