We came to the Badlands to boondock for two nights. We stayed five.
That was not a plan, it was a series of small decisions where leaving kept sounding worse than staying. The heat wave took the first two days away from us, so the hike we actually came for kept sliding. And then the place just kept handing us reasons.
This is how it ended: the trail with the ladder, an unexpected herd, a storm that chased us off a ridge, and a mistake we will not make twice.
Day three, and the heat finally broke
Tuesday, and Nathan had the day off work. It was around 90 instead of 105, which after two days of triple digits felt genuinely pleasant.
Solar was at 70 percent and doing something we still find satisfying to watch: running the air conditioning and charging the batteries at the same time, off the same sun. We turned it off before heading out so it would be at 100 when we got back.
First stop was a prairie dog town. Most of them were hiding from the heat, but enough were out to make it worth pulling over, sitting up on their mounds looking unbothered. Even the birds were crowded into whatever shade they could find.
The cows moved in
On the way back we came around a bend and the road was full of cattle.
Not a few. A herd, standing in the road and along the edge of the cliff, in a spot where a spooked animal has nowhere good to go. We ended up crawling past at walking speed on the side they clearly knew, trying very hard not to be interesting.
Then we got home and found more of them around the RV.
There is a specific feeling to parking your house somewhere and coming back to find livestock has claimed the yard. We had to walk from the truck to our own front door through a group of cows with calves, going slowly, talking quietly, being as boring as we could possibly be. It worked. They watched us the whole way and did not care.
What to do if a cow charges you
Fabiola looked it up, because cattle do actually hurt people, especially cows with calves.
The advice Nathan gave, and immediately hedged on camera: do not run directly away from an animal that is charging you, because it is faster than you and it will simply keep going in that direction. Run perpendicular instead, across its line, so it goes past and has to turn around.
He also said, on camera, "in case I'm wrong, internet, don't follow my advice, do your own research," which we are repeating here for the same reason.
The practical version is simpler. Give them room, move calmly, do not get between a cow and her calf, and do not treat a bull as scenery.
"I feel fortunate"
The sunset that evening stopped the conversation.
Fabiola asked Nathan how it felt to be looking at it, and he took a while, then landed on fortunate rather than lucky. Lucky is something that happens to you. Fortunate is being aware of what you have got.
What he was getting at is that if someone built a hotel on this ridge, they would charge $300 a night for the same view, and people would pay it. We were parked on it for free, in our own house, with our own bed, with the flexibility to stay another day because nobody was expecting us anywhere.
That is the whole argument for boondocking, in one sentence, said out loud by accident.
We also finally understood what we were looking at. All of this was underwater once, part of a shallow sea across the middle of the continent. Sediment layered up over millions of years in different densities. When the Rockies rose and the water drained, erosion took the soft material away and left the hard material standing. The formations are what did not wash off.
The Notch Trail, and the ladder
Day four, and we finally did it.
We started on the wrong trail, which turned out fine because the Window Trail is a short boardwalk with a serious view. Then we found the actual Notch trailhead, which is not obvious. You stand there for a second genuinely unsure which pile of rocks is the path.
The Notch Trail is about an hour and a half round trip, and the reason people talk about it is the ladder. It is a wooden log ladder bolted to a steep slope, and it is longer and more exposed than photos make it look. Fabiola got partway up and told Nathan she was getting dizzy. Not falling dizzy, the vertigo kind, where being high up starts messing with your eyes.
Nathan's rule, which he got from a brother who fell out of a tree as a kid: keep three limbs attached at all times, move one thing at a time. That is the whole technique. It sounds obvious and it is the thing that actually works, going up and coming down.
Her legs were shaking at the top. She went up anyway.
The top, and then the sky changed
After the ladder the trail runs along a ledge with loose gravel underfoot and a real drop on one side. There are signs telling you not to go left, because left is worse. You go deeper in and climb through the rocks instead, and there is a small cave along the way that would make a decent shelter.
The notch at the end opens onto the whole plain below. Fabiola's description was that it felt like Mars. Nathan said Star Trek. Either way, standing there was the moment the Badlands finally felt finished for us.
Then we noticed the clouds.
We had about forty minutes before sunset and a storm building fast in front of it. The rock we had just climbed is not something you want to be on when it rains, because it stops being grippy almost immediately. So we went back down faster than we went up, three points of contact the whole way, and got off the ladder as the lightning started.
Fabiola called it the most epic hike of her life, mostly on adrenaline, and she was not wrong.
We left the windows open
We made it to the truck. The wind hit hard enough to throw sand across the parking lot.
Then, standing there watching it, we remembered that a couple of the RV windows were open.
They were. The rig was fine, nothing was damaged, and there was no real water inside. But there was dust on everything. The chairs, the counters, the floor, a fine layer of Badlands over the entire interior. It looked, in Fabiola's words, like Burning Man.
So: close your windows before you leave, even for a short hike, even when the forecast says the rain is hours away. Out here the forecast said nine o'clock. The storm did not.
The roommates we did not invite
Last morning, and there was a ticking noise we had blamed on a fan the night before.
It was a mouse. Two, actually, both in a metal box trap that lives permanently in our pantry. The glue pad inside had long since stopped being sticky, so neither of them was really stuck, they were just in a box being annoyed about it. Nathan did a live release down the road, well away from the rig.
The useful part is why they got in. Checking the outside, one of the underbelly guards had come off somewhere in transit, leaving an open path straight up into the RV. That is the entry point, and we would not have gone looking for it if the mice had not told us.
New habit, added to the arrival checklist: walk the underbelly and confirm those guards are all in place, especially before a stretch of boondocking where you are parked in a field.
If mice are your current problem, we have written the longer version of what has and has not worked for us in our guide to getting rid of mice in an RV.
Five days instead of two
We got heat, storms, dust, cows, a national park, a hike neither of us will forget, and two mice.
The truck came home covered in mud. Everything inside needed cleaning. Nathan's hair had entirely given up.
And it remains, without much argument from either of us, our favorite boondocking spot so far. We send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week, and the signup form is on our newsletter page.