In an earlier post – The Badlands – Good Lands for Traveling – I had mentioned that the Lakota had originally named the area we now call the Badlands “mako sica,” or “land bad.”
I recently discovered, courtesy of some people I met while traveling in the Badlands, that there is a new trail being proposed called the Mako Sica Trail, and it will eventually run roughly east/west from Rapid City on the edge of the Black Hills to Kadoka on the fringes of the Badlands, a distance of over 100 miles!
The trail will be a converted railway line that has fallen into disuse in recent decades, and the trail building effort is led by a group called West River Trail Coalition. Below is a link to a video from their website explaining a bit more about the trail and the efforts to save a crumbling bridge that will one day be a key part of the trail:
I think this is a wonderful idea and it’s exciting to have so many trail efforts being proposed in the Great Plains region. Clearly, the time has come for the Great Plains to re-invent itself as a place of world class recreation possibilities.
The Great Plains Trail 