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WARNING: This text here about The Badlands is beautiful, but difficult. I would hate to simplify it. It's taken from a Lakota and Cheyenne tour guides site. Let's see if we can learn some new vocabulary. If it's too difficult for you, go to the second part.
MACO SICA – THE BADLANDS
The Badlands are a geologist’s heaven. This land
was seventy-five million years in the making (now eroding at the rate of an
inch -- 2.5 cm -- per year) and amid the multi-hued pinnacles and buttes you will explore a
barren moonscape, seemingly impervious to life, yet as inhospitable as the
corrugated terrain sounds, the Badlands brutality is deceiving. Look with native eyes and you will see prairie dogs twitch and chatter by their burrows
like nervous commuters waiting for a late train, while buzzards, coyotes, hawks
and bobcats hope it never arrives. Bighorn sheep leap precariously over
crumbling ledges on cliff walls and mule deer scour crevasses at dusk and dawn.
On the mesas, antelope bucks groom themselves for impressionable does and,
indifferent to their performances, the buffalo watch them all come and
go. This area is known to Lakotas as Maco Sica ("land bad").
_____________________________________________________-- rate = here, "à la vitesse de"
--amid = surrounded by
--multi-hued = multicolored
--pinnacles = cimes, sommets
--barren = producing little or no vegetation
--seemingly impervious to life = giving the impression that life there is impossible
--yet, as inhospitable as the corrugated terrain sounds = cependant, aussi inhospitalier qu'apparaît ce terrain ondulé
--deceiving = trompeur
--twitch = sursauter
--chatter = make their animal noises (bavarder!)
--burrows = their underground homes
--commuters = people to travel regularly back and forth over some distance (usually to go to work in the morning and to return home in the evening)
--buzzard = espèce de vautour
-- hawks = faucons
--bobcats = lynx
--leap = jump
--crumbling ledges = corniches croulantes
--cliff = falaise
--scour = here, to go or move quickly about, over or through in search of something
--at dusk and dawn = crépuscule et l'aube
-- bucks = les mâles
--groom themselves = se font beaux
-- does = careful, it's not a verb you know, it's a noun : bucks : les mâles, does: les femelles! for deer and antelope and it is pronounced does like toes, grows, rose, froze!!!!!
Wikipedia Simple English is definitely less poetic:
Badlands National Park (Lakota: Makȟóšiča]) is a national park in southwestern South Dakota that protects 98,240 hectares of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires blended with the largest undisturbed mixed grass prairie in the United States. The park is managed by the National Park Service.
The Badlands Wilderness protects 25,958 hectares of the park as a designated wilderness area and is the site of the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret, the most endangered land mammal in North America.
The South Unit, or Stronghold Unit, is co-managed with the Oglala Lakota tribe and includes sites of 1890s Ghost Dances. Red Shirt Table is the park's highest point at 3,340 feet (1,020 m).
Authorized as Badlands National Monument on March 4, 1929, it was not established until January 25, 1939. It was redesignated a national park on November 10, 1978.
Animals that inhabit this park include: !
- badger
- bighorn sheep
- bison
- black-billed magpie
- black-footed ferret
- black-tailed prairie dog
- bobcat
- coyote
- elk
- mule deer
- pronghorn
- prairie rattlesnake
- porcupine
- swift fox
- white-tailed deer
You can look in http://www.wordreference.com for the words you don't know! I did my work in the first part of this blog post!
My best,
My best,
Jane
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