1 active Badlands alert
- ClosureNotch Trail closed for ladder repairsNotch Trail and all areas within 100 feet of the designated trail are closed; do not enter the closure area.Official details
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Before you go
The highest, rockiest slopes around here are a summer buffet for grizzly bears.
Badlands Tour Guide
Your drive to Prairie Homestead, narrated.
Parkwolf is a GPS audio tour guide for Badlands National Park. As you drive, it chimes in with what’s ahead: hidden gems, upcoming stops, history, geology, and wildlife, right through your car’s speakers.
See the Badlands audio tourRecorded for this place
Prairie Homestead0:00 / 0:27
“You're coming up on Prairie Homestead, a separate historic site near the park's northeast entrance.”
Plays as you drive up to Prairie Homestead in the Parkwolf Badlands Tour Guide.
More stories near here in the app
- Big Badlands Overlook
- Vertical Seams in the Cliffs
- The Brontothere’s Paired Horns
- Door, Window and Notch Trailheads
- 116 audio storiesacross Badlands’s roads, triggered by GPS as you drive
- Wildlife heatmapsfor Bison, Bighorn Sheep, Prairie Dog, and 13 more
- Works offlinemaps, 11 trails, 34 places, and audio download before you lose signal
- CarPlay readysimple controls built for the drive
“We recently toured Badlands, Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore and more! We learned so much from this app as we toured each of these sites. The audio tours are worth the money.”
Guide
More about Prairie Homestead
A homestead beside the BadlandsPrairie Homestead is a historic sod house and farmstead near Badlands National Park’s northeast…
Prairie Homestead is a historic sod house and farmstead near Badlands National Park’s northeast entrance, built by Ed Brown and his family in 1909. It sits along SD-240 as a separate historic property, not an NPS visitor facility. If you’re curious about the practical side of prairie settlement, the original home gives the story a real place to start.
Building with sodWood was scarce across the open prairie, so settlers cut blocks of grass-rooted earth and…
Wood was scarce across the open prairie, so settlers cut blocks of grass-rooted earth and stacked them into walls. The Brown house used buffalo-grass sod with cottonwood supports and a sod-covered roof. Those thick walls helped shelter families from harsh weather, but sod could wear away in rain and let insects in.
The rest of the farmsteadThe homestead also had a barn, chicken house, outhouse and a cave dug into the bank as a root…
The homestead also had a barn, chicken house, outhouse and a cave dug into the bank as a root cellar. It helped keep food cool in summer and protected it from freezing in winter. The farm buildings and storage cave show how much daily life depended on the materials and landscape right around the house. For a photo, keep the low sod roof and a little of the prairie grass in the frame; together they make the home read as a sod dwelling, not just a weathered cabin.
Wildlife
Wildlife in Badlands
760 sightingsBisonMost seen around 6 PMSighting map
1,060 sightingsBighorn SheepMost seen around 6 AMSighting map
904 sightingsPrairie DogMost seen around 5 PMSighting map
333 sightingsPronghornMost seen around 6 AMSighting map
304 sightingsMule DeerMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
87 sightingsCoyoteMost seen around 7 PMSighting mapSighting maps show where each species has been reported across Badlands. Wildlife moves, so no sighting is guaranteed.
