Cold, wildlife, ground, and signal

This page covers the Badlands, Wind Cave and Devils Tower, the three parks this site has first-hand notes from. Nothing here describes a place nobody has been.

Cold

The sky that makes a good night makes a cold one. Clear, dry air holds very little heat, so once the sun is gone the ground radiates straight out to space and the temperature drops faster than the afternoon would suggest. It is the same dryness that makes the stars worth the drive.

Summer is not an exception to this. An August evening that felt pleasant at the visitor center can be genuinely cold by the time the Milky Way core is high, and the people still out at 2am are usually the ones wearing more than they expected to need. Sitting still makes it worse, and stargazing is a sitting-still activity. A body that is not moving is not making much heat to lose.

The forecast right now. The coldest hour ahead at Wind Cave National Park is 51°F, before dawn on Tue, Sep 22. The afternoon before it reaches 60°F, so the fall is 9 degrees. That is a forecast for the nights in front of you rather than a figure for the season, and it moves every time this page is loaded.

Wildlife after dark

Bison are the animal to think about, and Wind Cave especially. After dark they are often on or beside the road, because pavement holds the day's heat longer than grass does. A herd on the road at night is one of the better things to come across from a car that is barely moving, and one of the worst at 45mph. They are large, fast, far less predictable than a grazing animal looks, and headlights pick them up late: a dark brown animal, standing still, against dark ground.

Prairie rattlesnakes are here too, and warm nights are when they move. They hold heat rather than making it, so a road surface or a flat rock that spent the day in the sun is a comfortable place to be at midnight. They are not looking for anyone. Almost all the trouble comes from a hand or a foot arriving somewhere before a light does.

Badlands National Park requires 100 feet from any wildlife, and names bison in particular. Each park posts its own, and the sign in front of you is the one to go by.

The ground, and what rain does to it

Badlands ground is not soil in the way most ground is soil. Dry, it is firm enough to trust. Wet, it turns to a slick paste that gives a tire and a boot sole almost nothing to hold, and the unpaved roads go first. Rain that has already stopped is not the same thing as a road that has already dried, and a surface can look passable from the pullout and behave completely differently forty feet in.

Formations are the other half of this. They are steep, they are crumbly by nature, and edges are hard to read by headlamp. What looks like solid rock underfoot in daylight is often packed clay that has been drying for a season.

Signal, and where it gives out

Coverage is patchy at the edges of these parks and absent in the middle of one of them. That cuts both ways. A phone that cannot ring is the reason a fair number of people come, and it is also the one thing worth arranging around before dark rather than after.

What covers the gap is not equipment. It is one person at home who knows which park, which road, and roughly when, and that costs a single message sent from somewhere the signal still works. After that the phone has done its job for the night.

Getting in, and staying overnight

Being able to drive in is not the same as being allowed to stay. Night access and overnight parking are separate questions, and the answer differs by park.

Park by park

These are first-hand, and they are the part of this page that changes depending on where you are going.

Badlands National Park

Roads. Sage Creek Rim Road gets sloppy after rain, and the berms become dangerous.

Parking. A vehicle can sit in any authorized parking area with the park pass in the windshield. It cannot be left overnight anywhere except the designated campgrounds.

Cell signal. Spotty, and it generally dies in the middle of the park. It works on the north side, along Sage Creek Rim Road and around Pinnacles, and degrades from there. It picks back up near the visitor center in the northern unit, close to Interior.

Underfoot. The ground can be unstable. When it is wet it turns sloppy and slippery.

Wind Cave National Park

Roads. The roads are very dark and wildlife roams. Be careful.

Parking. Designated places only. No overnight parking.

Wildlife. Beware of the bison.

Cell signal. For the most part, cell service doesn't work below or above ground. Plan accordingly. Look at the sky.

Devils Tower National Monument

Roads. The road surface is pretty good. Wildlife roams, so be careful.

Gate. Nobody is on duty at the gate.

Parking. A vehicle can sit overnight only in a registered campsite at the Belle Fourche River Campground. Overnight parking is not permitted in the visitor center or trailhead lots.

Cell signal. It works, but it is very weak.

Who to call

These come from the parks themselves. A park missing below is one nobody here has a number for yet, rather than one with nobody to reach.

Badlands National Park. Park information 605-433-5361. 25216 Ben Reifel Road, Interior, SD 57750.

Wind Cave National Park. Visitor information 605-745-4600. 26611 US Highway 385, Hot Springs, SD 57747-6027. Fax 605-745-4207.

Light, and the other people out there

Dark adaptation takes twenty to thirty minutes to build and about a second to lose. One white light costs it to everyone facing that direction, not only the person holding the light, and there is no way to hand it back. A group that has been settling in for half an hour starts again.

That is the entire reason red light became the convention at dark sites, and the reason this site has a red mode of its own. Long wavelengths barely stimulate the cells night vision depends on, so a red beam lets somebody find a lens cap without undoing the last half hour.

So the one request this page makes: where there are other people out in the dark nearby, red rather than white, and aimed at the ground rather than across it. Phone screens count, and they are usually the brightest thing anyone is carrying.