Featured Photo: Bonneville Lake with Bonneville Peak in the background. Wind River Range, Wyoming 2025
Colorful rock outcrops surrounding my truck radiate with the light of the setting sun. This is Badlands National Park in South Dakota. It is August 2025 and I am on my way from Minnesota to the Wind River Range of Wyoming to go backpacking with my friend Paul Gardner. For a bit of adventure I am trying a new driving route. My plan was to spend the night in the park sleeping in the back of my truck. The outside temperature is 96 degrees— keep driving.
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
Heading south, I enter the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at dusk. Scattered trailers surrounded by abandoned cars dot the landscape of rolling hills. Darkness falls, cars approach me on the highway with no lights or windows. This is a human badlands. In 2019, I wrote a story about a Native American Ojibwe friend. Read it here: THE WARRIOR. The story was published in the international literary journal Adelaide and where it made the short list for best non-fiction story of the year. From Wounded Knee to Leonard Peltier, I am driving through an uncomfortable history.
I pull over at the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, one of the worst acts of genocide in American history. Expecting a modern visitor center, I find instead an empty, dark parking lot and a hand painted wooden sign. Illuminating the sign with my headlights, I read the story. On December29, 1890, The U.S. military surrounded a group of mostly unarmed Lakota people and opened fire. Over 250 men, women and children were killed. The story continues at the back of the sign, but I am too unnerved to get out of my truck. Backing up, I am startled by someone pounding on my window. It is dark, there are no cars in the parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a face; adrenaline soars— fight or fly. This is not my land. I’m not wanted here. Punching the accelerator, I am gone.
Exiting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, I cross the border into Nebraska. Ahead, towering cumulus clouds are lit by flashes of lightning. The further south, the more intense the storm: lightning bolts and arcs of lightning, showers of sparks above my car (never seen that before); strong winds drive torrential rain across the highway. By ten pm the storm blows itself out. Out of the badlands, I crawl into my sleeping bag in the back of my truck.
Bridger and Popo Agie Wilderness
Photo: The north face of Mt. Hooker from our camp at Lake Baptiste. Wind River Range, Wyoming 2025.
Paul reaches the pass first. We are three days into a seven day backpack trip in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. Yesterday we crossed the continental divide into the Popo Agie Wilderness and lands within the Wind River Indian Reservation. This morning we left Lake Baptiste using GPS and maps to navigate trailess rugged terrain. I join Paul at the pass. Looking down steep cliffs to an azure blue lake, I turn to Paul and say, “This is the wrong pass.”
Paul nods, consults his map, and says, “I agree.” Off route in the wilderness is not a happy place. Our mood changes. We are now in survival mode in the badlands. We are both aware one bad decision can lead to others. It’s called the cascade effect. Read my article: Lucky to be Alive: 52 Years of Backcountry Skiing
I say, “We can back down and hike up the correct pass.” Neither of us like that option. It would add two or three hours to our day and we would still have another pass to climb guarded by arduous boulder fields on either side.
Paul says, “We could traverse the peak to the pass.”
Gazing at the steep slopes, I do not like what I see. Looking up, I say, “How about we climb up to the top of the ridge and see if we can hike to the pass or find another way down over the other side to the next pass.” We agree and start up.
Reaching the top, Paul heads out along the ridge toward the correct pass. As we hike, the ridge narrows and steepens. I look around for alternatives. Up ahead, Paul turns and says, “Dead end.”
I say, “Look over to the east. There is a saddle we can descend. The upper slopes are steep and rocky, but doable. Then we can angle down grassy ledges to the next pass.” Nine grueling hours after we left Lake Baptiste, we pitch our tents on soft alpine tundra close to the soothing sound of Roberts Creek.
Photo: Paul making breakfast at Roberts Lake, Wind River Range, Wyoming 2025
Not everyone, including the Native American, travels the badlands by choice. Laying in my tent that night I think of my partner and fiancé Sarah. The child of a Korean mother and GI father she never met, Sarah grew up a mixed race outcast in the badlands of war-ravaged South Korea in the 1960s. At age eleven, she was adopted by an American family, and with one of her three brothers, came to Minnesota. At age fifteen, she was raped by her best friend’s brother. She got pregnant. Instead of pressing her charges, her parents told her to get married or have an abortion. Her marriage produced five children by age nineteen; her triplets died at childbirth. She divorced her husband a year later. She has travelled in and out of the badlands her whole life: a true uncomfortable adventure.
Photo: The Cirque of the Towers, Wind River Range, Wyoming 2025
The last day of our backpack trip we hike through the Cirque of the Towers, a majestic collection of granite peaks coveted by alpinists across the globe. I have a 54 year history here. Paul goes ahead; in a hurry to get home. I cherish the solitude of the moment and let memories of climbs past fill my consciousness.
Conclusion
It has been a formidable hike. I dreamed up the route three years ago piecing it together from various sources and experience. I attempted it with my daughter in 2023, but we were turned back by incessant monsoon rains. Read the story here: Training with a Plan, Part II: Light the Fire The route travels a figure eight of 70 miles through the Wind River Wilderness with 18,000 feet of elevation gain. We climbed 9 passes over 11,000 feet with three days doing two passes in the same day. About a third is maintained trail, a third primitive unmaintained trail, and the rest trailess. It took us, two 70 year olds, seven days to complete. From strolling beneath the 2000 foot north face of Mt. Hooker to circling seldom visited Roberts Lake, we found solitude and priceless wilderness.
I seek out badlands. That is where you find adventure—out of your comfort zone.
Photo: Incoming storm, but with a pot of gold at the rainbow. Credit: Paul Gardner. Wind river Range, Wyoming 2025
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