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48 free Badlands National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Badlands National Park trivia quiz covers the sharply eroded buttes and pinnacles of southwestern South Dakota and the largest undisturbed mixed-grass prairie in the United States that surrounds them. Questions cover the geology (the Pierre Shale, the White River Group, the Yellow Mounds and the inch a year the rock loses to summer storms), the world-famous Oligocene fossil beds, and the wildlife, from the reintroduced bison herd to the black-footed ferret that was once declared extinct. The human story gets equal weight: the Lakota name that gives the park its own, the broken 1868 treaty, the Ghost Dance on Stronghold Table and the road to Wounded Knee, the Dust Bowl homesteaders, the World War II gunnery range that still litters the South Unit with ordnance, the Cold War missile silos next door, Dances with Wolves, and the drugstore in Wall that built an empire on free ice water. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Yellowstone and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which carved memorial, finished in 1941, lies about 60 miles west of gateway town Wall?
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore, carved by Gutzon Borglum between 1927 and 1941, drew a stream of motorists past Wall toward the Black Hills; the Crazy Horse Memorial nearby was only begun in 1948.
Q 02Besides eroded buttes and pinnacles, the park protects the largest undisturbed example of what in the US?
Mixed-grass prairie
Mixed-grass prairie covers most of the park, a transition zone between the wetter tallgrass prairie to the east and the shortgrass plains of the west, with grasses from ankle- to waist-high.
Q 03Which South Dakota city, the state's second largest, is the nearest major city to the park?
Rapid City
Rapid City, about an hour's drive west along Interstate 90, is the gateway to both the park and the Black Hills and has the region's main airport.
Q 04The park's South Unit is co-managed by the Park Service and which tribe?
Oglala Lakota
The Oglala Lakota, whose Pine Ridge Reservation contains the South Unit, have co-managed it with the Park Service under a 1976 agreement; the tribe has long sought to run it as a tribal national park.
Q 05Which president signed the 1929 law authorising Badlands National Monument on his final day in office?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge signed the act on 4 March 1929, his last day in office; its conditions, including a state-built highway and land purchases, took a decade, and Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the monument in January 1939.
Q 06In which year was Badlands redesignated from a national monument to a national park?
1978
In 1978 Congress redesignated the monument a national park, a decade after a 1968 act had more than doubled its area by adding lands that became the South Unit.
Q 07What is the highest point in the park?
Red Shirt Table
Red Shirt Table, at 3,340 feet in the South Unit, is the park's highest point; the Sharps Formation, the youngest rock layer, caps its tallest tables.
Q 08The park's main visitor center is named after Ben Reifel. Who was he?
The first Lakota elected to Congress
A Sicangu Lakota born in a log cabin on the Rosebud Reservation, he served five terms as a Republican from 1961 to 1971 and was the only Native American in Congress during the 1960s.
Q 09The Ben Reifel Visitor Center was built in 1957–58 under which National Park Service programme?
Mission 66
Mission 66 was a ten-year programme, launched in 1956, to modernise park facilities by the Service's 50th anniversary in 1966; the Badlands visitor center was one of its early products.
Q 10Which 1990 Best Picture winner was partly filmed in the park?
Dances with Wolves
Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner's epic, won seven Oscars; the bison hunt was shot at the Triple U buffalo ranch near Fort Pierre, while the park supplied Badlands scenery.
Q 11Where was the 1868 treaty promising the Badlands would forever belong to the Sioux signed?
Fort Laramie
Fort Laramie, in present-day Wyoming, hosted the 1868 treaty that set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills; Congress carved up that reservation in 1889.
Q 12One of the last Ghost Dances of 1890 was held on which flat-topped mesa in the park's South Unit?
Stronghold Table
Stronghold Table, a mesa reached only by a narrow neck of land, hosted one of the last Ghost Dances in late 1890; the dancers came down to Pine Ridge as winter closed in.
Q 13The Ghost Dance movement of 1890 followed the vision of which Paiute prophet?
Wovoka
Q 21The colourful band called the Yellow Mounds is what, geologically?
A deeply weathered ancient soil
A deeply weathered ancient soil: the Yellow Mounds are a paleosol that developed on the exposed Pierre Shale after the sea withdrew, later buried under river and floodplain sediments.
Q 22Roughly how fast do the bare Badlands slopes erode in summer thunderstorms?
About an inch a year
About an inch a year: the loose sediments soak up little rain, so brief downpours strip them fast; at that rate the formations are expected to wash away within about 500,000 years.
Q 23The ash beds preserved in the upper rock layers came from volcanic eruptions in which region?
Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, said he fell into a trance during the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889 and saw the dead return and the white man vanish.
Q 14Ghost Dance followers wore special shirts believed to have what power?
To stop bullets
To stop bullets: the ghost shirts were believed to turn away soldiers' bullets, a faith shattered when the army's guns cut down the dancers' supporters in December 1890.
Q 15Chief Spotted Elk's band crossed the Badlands Wall in December 1890 on the way to which tragedy?
Wounded Knee Massacre
Wounded Knee Massacre: on 29 December 1890 the 7th Cavalry opened fire while disarming Spotted Elk's band, killing at least 150 Lakota, many of them women and children, and about 25 soldiers.
Q 16Which people, now part of North Dakota's Three Affiliated Tribes, hunted the Badlands before the Lakota?
Arikara
The Arikara, a Caddoan-speaking farming people, camped in the Badlands before the Lakota arrived in the 18th century; charcoal from their fires and bison-butchering tools erode out of the stream banks.
Q 17The Badlands hold the richest known deposits of mammal fossils from which geological epoch?
Oligocene
They give a glimpse of life about 33 million years ago; the Lakota had already deduced from the bones and shells that the land was once under water.
Q 18Physician Hiram Prout attributed the first published Badlands fossil, an 1846 jaw fragment, to what creature?
A Paleotherium
A Paleotherium, a European Eocene relative of horses, was Prout's guess for the 1846 jaw; Joseph Leidy later recognised it as a brontothere, naming it Titanotherium prouti.
Q 19Which Yale professor visited in 1870 and pioneered better ways to extract near-complete skeletons?
O. C. Marsh
O. C. Marsh, Yale's first professor of paleontology, led a student expedition to the Badlands in 1870 and worked out methods for taking out near-complete skeletons rather than scattered bones.
Q 20The park's oldest rock, the Pierre Shale, was laid down 75 million years ago at the bottom of what?
The floor of a shallow inland sea
The floor of a shallow inland sea: the Western Interior Seaway left the Pierre Shale with fossils of ammonites and mosasaurs before draining away as the Rockies rose late in the Cretaceous.
The Great Basin
Repeated eruptions to the west dusted the floodplains; the Brule Formation between them dates to about 32 to 26 million years ago.
Q 24Which endangered mammal, declared extinct in 1979, was reintroduced to the Badlands Wilderness?
Black-footed ferret
Black-footed ferret: written off as extinct in 1979, the species was rediscovered in 1981 when a ranch dog at Meeteetse, Wyoming, killed one, and captive-bred animals were released in the park from 1994.
Q 25The park's reintroduced ferrets depend almost entirely on which animal for food and shelter?
Prairie dogs
Prairie dogs make up around 90% of a ferret's diet, and the ferrets live and raise their young in prairie dog burrows, which is why sylvatic plague in the towns is so dangerous to them.
Q 26The park's bison herd began in 1963 with 50 animals shipped from which other national park?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, then a national memorial park, supplied the 50 founding bison in 1963; a 2019 project expanded the herd's range by about 22,000 acres.
Q 27Which bird, seen in the park's grasslands, is South Dakota's official state bird?
Ring-necked pheasant
Ring-necked pheasant, an Asian species introduced to South Dakota in the early 1900s, became the state bird in 1943 and lives in the park's grassy draws and prairie edges.
Q 28Which grass, the most common in the park, is also South Dakota's official state grass?
Western wheatgrass
Western wheatgrass, a cool-season sod-former one to three feet tall, was named South Dakota's state grass in 1970 and dominates the park's prairie.
Q 29Which of these animals is NOT on the park's wildlife list?
Grizzly bear
Grizzly bear: grizzlies were wiped out on the plains in the 19th century, while bison, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, swift fox, coyotes, bobcats and prairie rattlesnakes all live in the park.
Q 30The Badlands Wilderness, designated in 1976, covers about what fraction of the park?
A quarter
A quarter, roughly: the 64,144-acre Badlands Wilderness makes up about 26% of the park; it has no marked trails, backcountry camping is allowed almost anywhere, and bicycles and motor vehicles are banned.