Badland Sunrise

I found an overlook in Theodore Roosevelt National Park that faced almost directly toward the sunrise and I arranged to be there a little before 5:00AM the next day to see it. I have no problem waking myself up for stuff like this as I get kind of excited and usually wake up before my alarm. When I got there, the sun was rising right where Photopills said it would, so I headed out to the end of the overlook to shoot a photo.

I did wish for more higher clouds to give me more of a color show, but I got what I got. The above photo is a merge of five photos shot at 18mm. I was trying to balance how much blank blue sky I got a above with all of the rolling hills of the landscape below.

Back toward the pullout, I noticed that I would probably be able to look down the trail toward the sunrise and maybe get an interesting perspective that way. There were also a lot of yellow wildflowers that showed up nicely. You can see the sun is just about to make it past the horizon and the trail out to the overlook leads almost directly to it. The image below is shot at 14mm focal length and that trail to the overlook is a bit longer than it appears.

I worked a lot on the contrast of the landscape in the above photos. I wanted the lighter cliffs to stand out among the darker vegetation as I was hoping that would add some apparent depth. You can also see the narrow sliver of the rising moon in the upper right.

After this, I headed back to Medora for some breakfast and then got on the road for Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Medora is a nice little town that is probably full of tourists like me in the summer. Below is a photo of Medora taken from an overlook just inside the park as I exited the park for the last time on this trip. The park visitors center is just behind the trees in the midground.

Thanks for reading. Up next Badlands National Park.

20 thoughts on “Badland Sunrise”

  1. Nice sunrise.

    So, there are badlands in both North and South Dakota? There must be a lot of bad guys in that part of our country. I hope you weren’t held up, and managed to keep your wallet and all your expensive baubles.

    Liked by 2 people

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