Dan Flores

I mean, this has become kind of the target sort of landscape for the dinosaur hunt around the world.

And that's primarily why, is because the Badlands are mostly composed of these really old mudstones and siltstones that have been exposed more recently, but that date back to the times before 65 million years ago.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

And so it's a universal, planetary kind of phenomenon, and we were lucky to have lots of expressions of it in the American West.

And so I was trying with this particular episode to convey to listeners and watchers the

The sense that Badlands in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were called that because this was not the sort of landscape you were looking for if you were hoping to settle somewhere in the West.

It didn't have grass.

It didn't have trees.

It didn't have shade.

It didn't have mineral deposits, hence Badlands.

these early descriptions referred to those kinds of places as bad lands but not only science but also art obviously this kind of aesthetic appreciation of the remarkable colors and sculptural forms of that sort of terrain i think has uh in our time especially probably in the last 50 or 60 years sort of elevated this kind of landscape to being one of the iconic ones of the west yeah and

Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon.

I haven't thought really hard about why, for example, men might have been drawn to certain kinds of terrain and women to this particular one.

But when I began putting together

the historical stories about Badlands Appreciation, about painters and photographers who had become sort of famous for doing work in the Badlands, I began to realize, wow, it's an extraordinarily...

large number of women as opposed to, say, I mean, there are certainly some great women painters of the Rocky Mountains, but many of the appreciators and painters of the Rockies tended to be men.

So there's something about this landscape, and I think the fact that it lacks utility but has a kind of an arresting beauty may have been one of the things that drew women.

And so

George O'Keefe clearly is the preeminent person that one can give credit to for having popularized Badlands in our time.

But, I mean, as I mentioned in this piece, there are a bunch of other women who play a major role.