On the western end of the park, Sage Creek Road leads you right into the midst of the biggest prairie dog town you’ve ever seen. In the basin, you can usually spot some bison too. PARK FACILITIES Cedar Pass Lodge is home to a dining facility and a gift shop specializing in Oglala Sioux Indian crafts. Cabins are available for overnight stays, including a number of “green” cabins. The adjacent Cedar Pass Campground offers both primitive and electric sites, along with run-ning water, flush toilets, and a dump station. Visitors can also stay at the Sage Creek Campground—a primitive site with vault toilets and no water. FOSSIL BEDS Badlands National Park also preserves the world’s great-est fossil beds of animals from the Oligocene Epoch of the Age of Mammals. In prehistory, the area was once much wetter than today, and supported incredible numbers of saber-toothed cats, miniature camels and horses, and even gigantic rhinoceros-like beasts called the titanotheres. Collecting by visitors became illegal when the area gained national park status in 1939. Prehistoric bones are still being uncovered today by park officials, many of them first reported by park visitors. If you do spot something that looks like a fossil, examine it as much as you want, but leave it as you found it and report it to a ranger at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center at Cedar Pass. SOUTH UNIT Since 1976, the National Park Service and the Oglala Sioux Tribe have partnered in managing Badlands National Park. Today, plans are almost complete to es-tablish the 133,000 acres of the park’s South Unit as the nation’s first tribal national park. If the U.S. Congress agrees, visitors will soon have expanded access and op-portunities across this rugged wilderness area. More information about the South Unit is available to tourists during the summer season at the White River Visitor Center, located 20 miles south of Scenic on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Call (605) 455-2878 for information. VISITOR CENTER At the Ben Reifel Visitor Center , you can sit back and relax in the 100-seat theater to watch an impressive, professional 22-minute film. Many of the kid-friendly ed-ucational exhibits feature interactive components with increasingly difficult skill levels. Colorful photos and life-size models illustrate the geology and paleontology of the Badlands. Badlands National Park 37 BLACK HILLS & BADLANDS REGION
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