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After the morning craziness I went back to my motel room, planning on sleeping. Well, that never happened. Sat around till 11 a.m. check out. So the rest of the day would be done on 2 hours of sleep. I explored more of the Badlands till about 4 pm. This time I went east to the visitor center. Nothing but amazing scenes the whole way. I was on one of these ledges when I hear a lady behind me a ways talking to her husband. "He's too close to that edge!" "I don't think he should be so close." I'm the last person that wants to fall off these, I wasn't that close. What was worse than the ledges at the ends of these, was the path there. It gets skinny in areas with neck-snapping falls on either side. The first time I went out on one was rather "funny". I had camera around neck, bag over shoulder, and tripod in hand. About 4 steps down the slant, my foot flies out from underneath me and I land on my ass. It rains on these, eroding some of it, but leaving behind a coating of lose dust. I of course was wearing my tractionless Adidas sandals. I get back up, and look at the cliffs off the sides of the rest of the path and say, ok, back to the car to put my shoes on at least.
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I wonder how many pictures the badlands have had taken of them by now. Hell I wonder how many it gets in a single day.
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10mm view trying to give some better scale. This is the one thing still cameras seem bad at, giving scale to something like this, mostly because you see one frame. I watched the little bit of video I shot, and it conveys it much better. I attempted to chase this day, but the morning cold outflow from hell thingy killed any good low level moisture. A supercell dropped south towards Rapid City, but never was very nice. Oh yeah, I had started to drive home when it flared up better behind me. So back west I went, almost to Rapid City. That was around 5pm. After doing that I said so much for the idea of making the drive back tonight. I went back to Wall and looked for a cheaper room than the stupid $108 "Econo"lodge. I didn't think I'd find it. I tried the Motel 6 and she says, $53.99! I thought to myself, way to go on not trying this one the night before. The rooms were just as nice as the Econo's. It felt really nice to be in a room in the early evening(7pm or so). I was so tired from the 2 hours of sleep the night before I never went out for the sunset in the badlands. I wanted more sunrise action, but I could see a complex of storms moving east in southern Montana. I figured they'd be there before sunrise. So the plan was sleep and get up by 4 a.m., so I could be setup and ready to go 30 minutes before sunrise in the Badlands. 5:05 sunrise is just too damn early! So I went to sleep around 11:30 and got up at 4 am. Not much sleep again. I get up, see the radar and about crap. That line of storms was between Wall and Rapid City, moving east. I had to have set a record for shortest amount of time to wake, take a shower, check out, and be on the road. I was literally running things to the car. On the way south I was setting up gear as I drove. The storm had a pretty nice shelf/wall on its leading edge, but it was almost on me already. If only I'd have gotten up 20 minutes sooner! I wound up trying for lightning, in the wind driven rain.
Continue to the next part of this Badlands Trip - The Day of the 19th |
