Badlands

The color of the Badlands is what most visitors remember and most photographs fail to communicate accurately. The formations are not one color — they are dozens. Cream and tan in the upper sedimentary layers, deep burgundy and rust in the iron-rich bands below, lavender and gray in the volcanic ash layers, the whole spectrum shifting continuously as the light angle changes. At midday those colors flatten to a washed-out beige. At sunrise and sunset they deepen and saturate to something that looks almost impossible — the kind of color that makes first-time visitors stop mid-sentence and just look.