Badlands Residency Day 2

March 23, 2012

I've decided to avoid stressing about not getting much painting time in yet, and enjoy all the opportunities I have this first week. I'll be able to learn more in a shorter amount of time, and once the school group leaves, things will get pretty quiet around here. There will be time for the painting and exploring. So today began with a 9am meeting for talks on park resources and fossils. Ed, the paleontologist I met my first night here, talked about some of the more major finds here at Badlands, as well as the geologic and ecologic history of the area. We followed that with a hike between Old NE Road and Door Window with both Ed and an ecologist from the park, Milt. They had great information and it was a lot of fun talking, asking questions, and seeing things along the way. Found more fossils on the hike, and I learned a trick paleontologists use to determine whether something is rock or fossil. If it's fossilized bone, it will stick to your tongue a little when you lick it because of its porousness. The kids then worked a bit on a mural project they're doing with kids from local schools in SD and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Dinner was some very tasty bison chili with fry bread. Then a few of us adults hiked back out to the spot where we found some fossils last night. Ed was able to identify one set of fossils as coming from a tortoise. Sun had set, and we didn't manage to find the other set, will try again another day. Then off to the amphitheater for an astronomy talk and telescope viewing of Mars and the nebula in Orion.   

Trail from Old NE Rd to Door Window.

Badlands Residency Day 1

March 22, 2012

Started my residency by tagging along with the group from Calhoun School in NYC. We left at 7am for a two hour drive through Pine Ridge Indian Reservation down to Red Cloud Heritage Center for a tour and history talk. Brings back my American Studies days which involved a fair amount of Indian Studies classes and teachers. On our drive we passed the Wounded Knee Massacre site and mass grave. The injustices that were done here are so appalling. Our tour leader at Red Cloud offered some figures to the kids who were posing questions. About 38,000 people live on the reservation, and the average family household income is $6,200 per year. Yet the kids who go to the Red Cloud school seem to do remarkably well. They have a 98-100% HS graduation rate, more than 80% go on for further education, and many go off to prestigious schools around the country to study. It sounds like the vast majority later bring their skills back to the reservation to work to solve the myriad problems that cause the current conditions there. I won't take the time here to go into more detail, but the style of education the school uses sounds both enjoyable and effective.

Next we drove an hour or more into the South Unit of Badlands, which is the more remote area of the park that is owned by the tribe. We went to Sheep Mountain, a large sod table, which is one of Sara's (a park ranger) favorite areas of the park. The road took us up onto the table, but then we had to hike 2+ miles to get to the other side where the view is very similar to that from the canyon rim at Bryce Canyon.  Really lovely.  Plenty of other things to see along the way like Coyote footprints and scat, deer prints, a snake, western bluebirds, etc.

Then back to the housing area, a brief rest, and then the teachers from Calhoun led a few students on a fossil hunt in the area that stretches behind the visitor's center and housing area. I joined them, and we found all sorts of things: a small herd of mule deer, rodent bones, mammal bones, scat, a hole/den, and best of all, some great fossils. We'll try to get Ed the Paleontologist out there tomorrow to identify the species and see if it's remarkable or typical.   

Where we parked at Sheep Mountain.

View from the end of the trail.

Near the end of the trail.