I sat poised behind a crumbling sediment façade. The bison herd grazed lazily in a field not more than 200 yards from where I hid.
Jesse stood in the open 100 yards from the herd, and the alpha-male spotted him.
He should have realized of the danger; every bison herd we encountered up to that point had a lookout to stand apart and flank any attackers. It’s curious behavior, considering bison have no natural predators aside from the spear-toting bipeds of antiquity.
Which is probably what those bison saw when they looked at us. I’m sure they wondered, “How did they get way out here?”
During my final collegiate spring break in March of 2009, I traveled with my friend, Jesse, to Badlands National Park in South Dakota. While most of my peers hopped flights to Cancun, Honduras or New Jersey, Jesse and I saddled up in my old Ford Focus hatchback and hit the westward road.
We would quickly assume to have learned the nuances of the mighty American Bison, an animal wielding such a brutish attack it would feel like being hit by a Chevy with two galvanized steel horns on the grill.
Our successful arrival to the nearby South Dakotan town called Wall came as darkness settled in the sky. Wall is a small tourist town of 800 permanent residents mere miles from the boundary to Badlands National Park.
From the Wall Area Chamber of Commerce website: “’The Wall’ standing between the great upper prairie flats and gentle grassy hills, is a rugged strip of tinted spires, ridges, and twisted gullies that ranges from a half mile to three miles wide and is over nine miles long. It is this series of formations that gave the town of Wall its name.”
It was the last bastion of advanced society we saw before our foray into the wild unknown, the land divided by the epic Wall.
We fueled up the car and filled our water bottles and took route 240 southbound.
The park’s area totals 244,000 acres, or 381 square miles. It is home to bighorn sheep, bison, prairie dogs, ferrets, hawks, eagles, pronghorns, and much more.
The overwhelming majority of Badland’s visitors take the loop road through the park of the park with the most spires and hoodoos. It takes about 2 hours, depending on how much time is spent at the various viewpoints.
We turned off the loop road as a faint stellar glow illuminated the hazy horizon. We made our way deep into the backcountry — only ten miles to the Sage Creek primitive campground.
We spent the night in the car, awaiting the glory of the morning sun to begin three days of bison tracking.
As the morning light crept in through the windshield, it was like Christmas morning for us.
We hustled to change outside in the frigid air. It was March, but it was still single-digit-temperature-weather in South Dakota. We peeled off our sweats and jumped into synthetic super-materials designed for temperatures like this.
Throughout the following three days, our path wound through an ever-changing landscape of grassy plains, dense stone mounds and crumbling spires of eroding sediment.
About 35 million years ago, runoff from the nearby Black Hills came to a stop in what is now Badlands National Park. Water and wind have shaped the land — and continue to do so. The land erodes at a rate of one inch per year.
The giant wall, that iconic brim around a bowl of buffalo, was formed mainly by prairie winds that pound the rock loose.

We set out in a direction away from the Wall and the road that loops around the north side of the park.
That decision set the tone for the remainder of the week.
“Hey, let’s head to that group of spires.”
“I know, let’s head toward that corner and see what’s there.”
“Look, bison, let’s stalk them.”
In 2007, the National Park Service inventoried the bison in Badlands. There were 441 total, the largest weighing 2,300 pounds, according to an Oct. 31, 2007 report.
But from a distance they all look the same: big, slow and grumpy.
During our first hour into Badlands, Jesse and I latched on to a bison herd of about 14. We kept them at a large distance, anywhere from 200 to 400 yards, sometimes more.
They follow the spines of long hills to avoid the brush of the lowlands. We tried to mimic their movements, but time after time we were forced to tramp through hip-high grasses and traverse sediment-ridden rivers that carved 15-foot walls in the ground. Bison are actually very fast.
We briefly found ourselves preoccupied with the smaller, plague-carrying mammals in the park, notably the black-tailed prairie dog. It’s an often-sighted mammal in all seasons since they live in noisy communities commonly called Prairie Dog Towns, which are huge flat areas that house hundreds of burrows underground where prairie dog families live.
When the novelty of the communal rodents wore off, we resumed our hunt of that bison herd.
Fortunately, we caught sight of the herd again. Unfortunately, it was miles away.
We tented on a tall, isolated butte. The panoramic view offered scenes of silhouetted spires, golden fields, and rolling hills dotted with dark green trees clinging to the white river.
Then, off in the distance, a herd of about two dozen in a field in a corner of The Wall came into view.
And so I knelt behind my crumbly façade as Jesse stood an end zone away from the alpha-male lookout. Jesse slowly backed away. A bison grunt is a very scary sound.
Danger avoided. I’m sure buffalo don’t want to run if they don’t have to.
On our third and last day in the north unit of the park, we were following a thin game path that meandered through the plains. There are no blazed trails due to the high amount of erosion.
Over hill and dale we marched until rounding a corner we noticed two mule deer standing awkwardly by.
This particular pair fled at the sound of Jesse and I, but to their dismay bounded directly into a small herd of sleeping bison.
We watched the pair pause in horror at realizing the danger that lay around them.
The long pause that followed was akin to the calm before the storm, and as the bison awoke, the storm did too.
The mule deer huddled. They talked it over. They charged the buffalo. They became startled once again as more buffalo bounded over the hill. They dashed among the groggy, snow-covered bison. They ran away.
After the escape of the mule deer, the bison took to confusion and hysteria.
They jumped to their feet, circling one another. Two males locked horns and thrashed each other around. In an instant, the herd turned south (the way of the mule deer) and tramped away, still in obvious havoc.
“Whoa, watch out,” I said, as we turned to leave.
“What the-“ said Jesse, as we gazed at the herd’s 1-ton alpha male with a curious mop of bison-hair on his very large head only 40 yards away, “Why do they always have a lookout?”
Back in Wall, we trudged into a kitschy themed restaurant and pondered the effectiveness of their lookout strategy. Bison burgers were on the menu.

Check out http://www.nps.gov/badl/index.htm for more info on Badlands National Park.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010