Toadstool Geologic Park, NE
Written by Bennett Lacerte ‘27
Photographs by Bennett Lacerte ‘27
I am the farthest from the ocean that I have ever been. We pull off Route 71, driving nine miles south through Oglala National Grassland down a dirt road littered with potholes. No cars follow. A cloud of dust obscures the path behind us, a low grey sky hangs overhead, and small chestnut-collard longspurs flutter across the barren expanse in front of us, narrowly dodging our rumbling Toyota Highlander. Wheatgrass, threadleaf sedge, and other spiny shrubs dot the landscape. I have not seen a tree in many miles.
My brother, our two friends Sam and Lucy, and I are eleven days into our August “back-to-school” pilgrimage across the country, and we’ve taken our time weaving through America’s Western jewels: Yellowstone, Glacier, Zion, the Grand Canyon, and now, the unassuming Toadstool Geologic Park in western Nebraska. This is the only place in our drive of which I had no previous knowledge. It is no grand park—there are no overbearing monuments, no teeming tour guide groups, no seas of bobbing foreheads cast white with sunscreen, peeking behind expensive cameras and squinting one eye.
This is our last night of camping, of being in a place where you can scream and nothing—no person, no animal, no shrub—will so much as turn its head. It’s a bittersweet feeling. I’ve grown to enjoy my life on the road: thinking only of my next meal, next tank of gas, next campsite. Rain has followed us in every place we’ve been to, yet here in Nebraska, we are met with a dry, slow heat. With my window open, I feel my lips begin to chap in the warm air beating against my face. Thrumming through miles of prairie grasses, I recall Willa Cather’s My Ántonia: “There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
We drive past defunct tire swings built for children who have long outgrown them. Past stand-alone restaurants with plastic chairs that serve the best barbecue you have ever had in styrofoam cups. Where people squint at you with weathered blue eyes and furrowed brows, and you cannot tell if they are staring at you or at some place far behind you because their silence is so heavy. This is where the people are as silent as the land itself.
At the campground, which is named for its geologic formations that resemble toadstool mushrooms, six campsites, each with a metal overhang, fan out at different points along a dirt roundabout. An outhouse and a pay station lie squarely at the center, with a sign that reads: $5 CAMPING FEE, $3 PER CAR FOR DAY USE, DEPOSIT PAYMENT HERE. Fifty yards beyond the north end of the campground, the ground begins to fold and crinkle—gullies and ravines carving through steep ridges the height of two-story homes, threatening to swallow those who enter. A sharp contrast to the unending flatness that I have grown accustomed to. These are the toadstools, the badlands flowing in from South Dakota, and they extend north for as far as the eye can see.
Aside from the outhouse and the pay station, a “sodhouse” lying at the edges of the campground is the only man-made structure which stands for miles around. It is both a beacon of the Western frontier and a paltry reminder of a colonial past. A small plaque outside reads that someone once lived here in the nineteenth century, though not much is known beyond that. The sodhouse has since been remodeled—such an ephemeral structure would be long gone by now, swept away in the hot wind and absorbed back into the shifting land. I wander inside in search of refuge from the unrelenting sun. It is one room, maybe two hundred square feet, with four mud walls, a thatched roof, and a single “window” (more like an opening, as there is no glass)—making for an instantly cool, swampy climate. I feel the same sensation I have felt when stepping out of a frigid, biting wind into a warm cathedral. It is the feeling that you are stepping into something much larger and much older than yourself. I peek through the window which lets in a long yellow light, perfectly framing an otherworldly landscape sculpted from soft stone. A quiet wind filters through, tickling my cheek and whispering forgotten stories into my ear. This was once a home. Someone was here. Someone who knew how to dance with wind and cry upon seeing beautiful things, someone who hummed to themself in this home they built, someone who once knew love. Why did they leave?
Perhaps the silence felt too thick, the sun too strong, the land too empty. This is a place where many people and many more animals have passed through. The Brulé, Oglala Teton Sioux, Arapaho, Comanche, and Cheyenne Indigenous peoples once inhabited these grasslands. They fed their children, followed bison herds, sang and danced under thunderclouds and stars. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Spanish and the French took turns laying their claims on this land, but it was not until the United States acquired this region through the Louisiana Purchase that Indigenous people were forcibly relocated, severing a tightly-woven bond between people and land. Nebraska became a highway for fur traders and Manifest Destiny-era settlers, but various Northern European immigrants came to stay, to make a new life amongst the dry grass and the prairie dogs.
Yet, a story much older than humans is told on the ground beneath our feet. This land is the vestige of an ancient, shallow ocean, with rock formations known as badlands amassing thirty million years ago. The prehistoric seafloor has the remarkable ability to preserve time, making fossils a highlight of Toadstool Geologic Park—this place littered with snapshots of primitive beings frozen in time. Entelodonts, brontotheres, and oreodonts once chased each other down narrow channels, leaving their footprints to bake in the sun. This cracked earth does not wish to be made whole again.
As the sun is setting, we leave our campsite to see these primordial wonders, or at least be amidst their memory. Silt and shale crumble beneath our soles as we attempt to scale pinnacles of the once-seafloor. I wonder how many people before us have done the same thing—how human it is to want to get to high places. Darkness rises and Sam’s silhouette flickers in the wind on the ridge across from me. The sun setting appears as a candle flickering behind a paper screen. The warmth leftover from the daytime sun radiating back into my seated body. My palms carry the chalky residue of the ground beneath me.
Whose blood has stained this stone floor? What memories still float in this place without walls, without echoes?
Silent, empty places like these are good places for asking questions. It is in these ancient crevices where someone can abandon the weights trailing behind them. It is here, in this sad, orange light, where I allow newness to wash over me, where I take what comes. I take what comes.
At night, hot desert wind stirs our hammock, the strap of which chimes softly against the metal pole of the overhang. A freight train trembles in the distance, a beating torch inching across the flat horizon. My brother journals under the moonlight, his pencil scratching on wet paper and my breath drifting deeper into the fossil dreams of this sun-bleached land.