The three most reliable places to see bighorn sheep in Badlands National Park are Pinnacles Overlook, Big Badlands Overlook and Castle Trail, the three the National Park Service names, and the three our guides check first. Go at dawn or dusk, when sheep come down to feed. Through the heat of the day they climb back into the rock and become very hard to pick out.
Now the number nobody else will give you. About 25% of our wildlife tours find bighorn sheep. That is one in four, and it is with guides who are out there every week and know where the herd has been.
We publish that figure because the alternative is pretending. Anyone guaranteeing you bighorn is guessing. What you can do is stack the odds, right place, right hour, right technique, and this guide is all three.
The three places worth your time
Pinnacles Overlook
This is the most consistent of the three, and the one worth the most patience. Pinnacles sits high on the western end of the Badlands Loop Road, and it is a naturally friendly location for bighorn, which means they can appear in any direction. North, south, east or west. Do not fix on one slope and decide there is nothing there.
Because you are looking down into the formations rather than up at them, animals that would be invisible from the road below are exposed against the rock.
Big Badlands Overlook
Near the park’s northeast entrance, and the first major stop most visitors reach coming from Wall or I-90. Sheep work the slopes below the overlook. Because this is the busiest pull-off in the park, the animals here are noticeably used to people, which makes them easier to photograph, and easier for visitors to get too close to.
Castle Trail
The only one of the three that asks you to walk, and the one that puts you in their terrain rather than watching from a pull-off. Sheep are regularly encountered along it, and we wrote a separate guide to hiking the Castle Trail.
We take guests onto Castle Trail on our hiking-inclusive tours, under a National Park Service permit. If walking into the formations on foot is what you are after rather than stopping at overlooks, that is the tour to ask about.
When to go
Time of day matters more than season. Dawn and dusk are when sheep feed. Midday in summer is the worst window in the park for wildlife of any kind.
For lambs, the window is mid-April through mid-June. But the lambs are worth looking for all year, they spend months practicing on the rock, climbing the formations and testing what they can hold onto.
Listen before you look
Here is something you will not read in a park brochure. You often hear bighorn before you see them.
Lambs head-butt each other, and the sound it makes is a loud, flat CRACK that carries across the formations. Once you know what it is, it is unmistakable. Follow the sound and you will usually find them, and it is worth stopping for, because a bout can carry on for several minutes.
It is one of the best things that happens in this park, and most visitors drive past it because they are only using their eyes.
How to spot them
Bighorn are almost exactly the color of Badlands rock and they hold still for long periods. Three things work:
- Bring binoculars. This is not optional. This is the single biggest difference between visitors who see sheep and visitors who do not.
- Stand still. People scan while walking and see nothing. Stop moving first.
- Scan slowly, and look for food. Work across a formation without rushing, and pay attention to small patches of grass or scrub. That is what the sheep are there for, and that is where they will be.
Most people fail at this because they sweep a whole cliff in ten seconds and conclude it is empty. Give one formation two full minutes.
Why there are bighorn here at all
The bighorn here today are not the ones that were here originally.
The native animal was the Audubon’s bighorn, sometimes called the Badlands bighorn, a subspecies adapted to this terrain. It was hunted out. The last were shot in the 1920s and the subspecies was gone from its range by around 1924. It is extinct.
In 1964, the National Park Service, South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks and the Colorado Division of Wildlife released 22 Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep from Pikes Peak, Colorado, into the Badlands. Every sheep in the park descends from those 22 animals, and the herd is now one of the largest and healthiest in South Dakota.
So when a lamb cracks heads with another lamb on the rock below Pinnacles, you are hearing the result of a deliberate, decades-long repair job, a different animal standing in the place of one people erased inside a single generation.
How close is too close
Bighorn will sometimes come close to a stopped vehicle on their own. That is their choice and it is fine. Approaching them is not.
We keep guests 75 to 150 feet from wildlife, depending on the situation. And one rule matters more than the distance itself:
If a sheep is somewhere without an escape route, do not approach it at all. A cornered animal on a narrow ledge or in a closed drainage has only one way out, through you. Back off and let it move on its own terms.
If you are bringing a dog: pets must be leashed to no more than six feet and are banned from all trails, the Badlands Wilderness Area and prairie dog colonies. That rules out Castle Trail entirely.
What else you will see while looking
- Bison, along Sage Creek Rim Road, not the paved Loop Road. See the warning below before you drive it.
- Prairie dogs, Roberts Prairie Dog Town, Burns Basin Overlook and Sage Creek Campground.
- Deer, coyotes and snakes, anywhere. The Park Service says outright that their locations are unpredictable.
A straight warning about Sage Creek Rim Road. It is gravel, and we do not recommend it if you are an inexperienced driver, do not have four-wheel drive, or are in a rental car. It has significant washboard, the berms at the edges can be soft, and the surface turns slick when wet. It is where the bison are, but it is not a road to take casually, and a rental agreement may not cover you on it. Our driving guide from Rapid City goes through the road and both park entrances.
Go with someone who does this weekly
One in four is our honest hit rate, and it is achieved with binoculars, knowledge of where the herd has been that week, and the patience to sit at an overlook scanning slowly instead of driving on after ninety seconds. On your own, with no binoculars and no idea which drainage to watch, your odds are considerably worse.
Our Badlands Wildlife Tour is a private, full-day trip built around exactly this, bighorn at the overlooks, bison along Sage Creek in a vehicle equipped for that road, and the prairie dog towns, timed for the hours when animals are moving. Binoculars are provided. Every departure is private to your group, so when we find sheep, we stay as long as you want to watch them.
Prefer the formations in low light, or the sky after dark? The Sunset and Golden Hour Tour and the Stargazing Tour cover the same country at the other end of the day, in what is now a certified International Dark Sky Park.
Check availability for the Wildlife Tour, or call 605-252-9100 to ask what the sheep have been doing this week.