It’s like there was a big, flat, thick oatmeal cookie covered in grass. Some giant, Paul Bunyan perhaps, or maybe a bison, came along and bit down deep into the cookie, breaking off a chunk that crumbled into smaller pieces, leaving toothmarks in everything.
Or maybe The Badlands was once a grass plain visited by tourists. The tourists kept digging up pieces of grass to take home, leaving the ground vulnerable to erosion and further depletion by tourists. Thus, it is the world’s first tourist-created natural tourist attraction. This explains why the park service doesn’t ever close it, not even at night. They want us tourists to shuffle our feet out to the edges to shave off more of the crumbs. For those who always wanted to climb the sacred rocks, draw your name in the dirt with a stick, this is your chance, your natural park petting zoo. There’s no harm to be done — only the task of making The Badlands worse.
The Road to Mt Rushmore, 2010 