Jack focuses on a wary wabbit.
The ferocious critter captured up close
"The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth." Teddy Roosevelt
A crested beardtongue [I think] grows out of the scoria chips.
I tried my best to get a picture of this guy from the front but his instinct is to turn his quills toward anything that approaches. It was comedic, I'm sure, to watch the two of us circling. Every time I would move to the right, he would pivot so I saw nothing but his backside. Finally, when I moved far enough away from some nearby brush, he made a run for it. He was surprisingly quick on his feet.
According to Park's web site, "Lightning strikes and prairie fires can ignite coal beds, which then may burn for many years. When a coal bed burns, it bakes the overlying sediments into a hard, natural brick that geologists call porcelanite but is locally called clinker or scoria. The red color of the rock comes from the oxidation of iron released from the coal as it burns. The burning lends both color to the badlands and helps to shape them. These hardened rocks are more resistant to erosion than the unbaked rocks nearby. Over time, erosion has worn down the less resistant rocks, leaving behind a jumble of knobs, ridges, and buttes topped with durable red scoria caps."