South Dakota Badlands ~ I: Photograph by JL Gardner. Talk about "surface of the moon", this place is the lunar surface as I can only imagine, right here on earth! Strange rock shapes, colors and formations abound, interspersed with grasslands, beautiful vistas, buffalo and prarie dogs. It's quite a place to explore and photograph.

Here's something from the National Parks Service website about the Badlands: "Containing the world’s richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds, dating 37-28 million years old, the evolutionary stories of mammals such as the horse and rhinoceros arise from the 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires. Bison, bighorn sheep, endangered black-footed ferrets, and swift fox roam one of the largest, protected mixed-grass prairies in the United States."