Painted Canyon Overlook

Painted Canyon

Quick Facts

Location:

Painted Canyon

Amenities

1 listed

Information

This part of the park is most known for its great views of the North Dakota Badlands. The buttes scattered throughout the canyon show the distinct layers of rock of various colors that come together to create a “painted” appearance. You can also see some other prominent features of the park, such as Buck Hill across the canyon, and the Painted Canyon Trail meandering below you. Let us dive into the fascinating geologic history of the park and learn how the landscapes before you were formed. Our park’s story begins around 65 million years ago, in the Paleogene epoch. The park looked quite different, as it was a low-lying swamp and river tributary. This area served as a convergence for several ancient rivers, with all their sediment being deposited in the area. The sediment being carried by these rivers came from the newly formed Rocky Mountains. Around this time, ash from ancient western volcanoes were dumped into these rivers as well. Over time the collection of all these materials would settle into the layers of rock that form the canyon you overlook today.

However, no geological story is complete without talking about erosion. The process of erosion plays a major part in how the buttes and canyons of the park were formed. Around 2 million years ago, river erosion for the park changed heavily. During this time, supermassive continental ice sheets were moving south from what is now Canada. The ice sheets moved far enough south to reach what is now the north unit of our park. This shifted the flow of many ancient north-flowing rivers, causing them to now empty into the Missouri River instead of Hudson Bay. This alteration in the mechanics of the river caused it to flow faster and cut deeper into the land around it. And with most rocks in the area being rather soft, it eroded layers away at a quick pace. However, there is more to the story than just the rock layers being eroded away. The area of the park goes through a very neat process called differential erosion. With all these different layers of rock present in the landscape, all of them have differing strength properties. This causes the separate layers to erode at various speeds. This means hard rocks like sandstone act as a protective cap for the softer layers such as clay below it. Or the reverse can happen, softer layers above quickly disappear to reveal the harder rock layers below. This process gave way to an area that Theodore Roosevelt called the “fantastically broken” badlands.