Badlands National Park
— — the prairie cut open in coloured layers.
Not only on a wall.
“A 244,000-acre stretch of eroded buttes and pinnacles in the South Dakota prairie, east of the Black Hills. The rock reads in horizontal bands of yellow, red, and pale gray, tens of millions of years of sediment cut open by wind and water. Bison and bighorn sheep work the mixed-grass tableland between the formations. The Lakota called the country mako sica.
Badlands National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Badlands National Park covers 244,000 acres in southwestern South Dakota, about seventy-five miles east of the Black Hills and Rapid City. The park is divided into the North Unit (the most-visited, along the Badlands Loop Road), the Stronghold Unit, and the Palmer Creek Unit. The southern units lie within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and are co-managed with the Oglala Sioux Tribe. The Lakota name for the region, mako sica, translated by French trappers as les mauvaises terres, gave the park its English name.
The buttes and spires are sedimentary rock laid down between roughly 75 and 28 million years ago, when the area was a shallow sea floor and later a subtropical floodplain. Erosion exposes the layers as horizontal bands: the dark Pierre Shale at the base, then the yellow Yellow Mounds, red and gray claystones above, and tan Sharps Formation at the top. The park preserves one of the world's richest Oligocene mammal fossil beds, including extinct rhinoceros-like brontotheres and sheep-sized oreodonts. The Ben Reifel Visitor Center holds working fossil-prep displays.
The park is open year-round. The peak visitor window runs May through September, when bison are calving on the mixed-grass prairie and wildflowers cycle through the valleys. Summer afternoons regularly cross 100°F with little shade; mornings and evenings give the most workable light, including the long pink dusk for which the formations are best known. Winter brings snow on the spires and far fewer visitors. The gravel Sage Creek Rim Road can close after storms, and the town of Wall sits eight miles from the north entrance.