Badlands, SD – Cruising along the meandering scenic bypass through Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota it’s difficult to ignore the supernatural inklings they evoke. Teddy Roosevelt, awed by the dark beauty of this region, aptly described the Badlands as “hell without the fire.”

Indeed, this vast, jagged landscape is composed of eroded buttes and spires spread across nearly 244,000 acres that formed as a giant sea receded some 69 million years ago. Prehistoric animals likes mammoths, rhinos and saber-toothed cats once flourished here, making it one of the most fossil-rich areas in the nation, with some fossils dating back 33 million years. The erosion that formed the Badlands we see today began approximately 500,000 years ago. It’s expected to take just as many years before it’s completely eroded away.

Paleo-Indian tribes lived here prior to the arrival of the Lakota. In 1890, Chief Big Foot passed through here in the run-up to the Massacre at Wounded Knee, in which 300 Sioux Indians were felled by U.S. Army guns, Big Foot among them. During World War II, the military used a southern portion of the badlands as a practice aerial bombing range.

There are many hiking trails graded to varying degrees of difficulty, but don’t get to close to the edges. Even after millions of years the land is soft and crumbly. And beware of rattlesnakes, which tend to hide in crevices and near rocks. Because of the park’s size, help isn’t immediately available. Camping in designated areas is also permitted.

Lost Springs, WY – If you’re looking for a drive to get away from it all, I-25 north from Denver to US-HWY 20 east in Wyoming is about as remote as it gets. Two-hundred-and-fifty miles of beautiful nothing. You won’t see utility lines strung along as there are no towns along the way. It’s beautiful country, with large, rocky hills covered with prairie short grass. Wyoming is the nation’s least populous state and Lost Springs is its least populous town.

Lost Springs sits on US-HWY 20 east. It’s a town that never really was. It’s population peaked during the mining boom of the 1920s, but has been in decline since. The town has one mayor and a councilman. In 2000, census workers wrongly calculated the population at 1, to the chagrin of the other 3. Lost Springs may have only four residents, but there’s room for at least one more, as five mobile homes sit within its .1 miles. That’s right, .1 miles.

Just fifteen minutes from downtown Denver you’ll find Red Rocks Park, famous for its world-class outdoor amphitheater and its gigantic red sandstone outcroppings. Many of the rocks are sedimentary and formed the bed of giant river more than 245 million years ago. Then, beginning some 170 million years later, the rivers dried and the Rocky Mountains began to form, causing the uplift which positioned the rocks at their current angles. Many fossils, including dinosaur bones, have been discovered here over the years.

The Ute Indians used the area as a camp before the whites drove them out. In 1964, The Beatles became the first rock band to play Red Rocks. When it’s not playing host to events, Red Rocks is a favorite destination for hikers, joggers, nature enthusiasts and anyone seeking a clean break from the hustle of city life. There is no admission fee which makes it all the more sweeter. Anyone traveling I-76 West through Colorado is strongly encouraged to visit the park as well as nearby Morrison, home to a variety of western-themed taverns, restaurants and boutiques.

That’s what is happening in Wisconsin. In one fell swoop, the Republican-controlled government is punting the state back into the 19th Century.

By the end of the week, public employees will be stripped of collective bargaining rights. People will be able to carry loaded guns. Bounty hunters will be making a comeback. $800 million in education funds will be wiped out, as will school districts’ ability to levy taxes. Child labor laws will be rolled back. Yesterday, The Feral Scribe spent the day at Wisconsin’s capitol building to photograph some of the protesting going on. It was loud, but peaceful, and at times seemed almost celebratory. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

This weekend, the city’s annual Bratfest charity drive became the new battleground, since the CEO of Bratfest’s chief sponsor, Johnsonville, has donated more than $20,000 over the last decade to a variety of Walker’s electoral campaigns. In response, at least three alternative Bratfests sprang up around Madison, a city hailed by some as “the Berkeley of the Midwest” and derided by others as “seventy-eight square miles surrounded by reality.”

Throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries these hills were harvested of their wood, which was used for charcoal, timber and to clear the way for farming. By the 20th Century, the hills were completely deforested. A new forest was replanted by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s.

Eastern State Penitentiary was the world's first modern prison. Its Gothic architecture was intended to scare prisoners and the public alike.

Fairmount, Philadelphia – Eastern State Penitentiary was conceived in 1787, in the living room of Benjamin Franklin, a leading member of the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. The reformist group was appalled by conditions at the recently opened Walnut Street Jail, located behind Independence Hall, where guards sold liquor to inmates and often made women available. The reformers believed that a policy of strict solitary confinement would better encourage spiritual development.

In 1790, the society convinced Pennsylvania’s legislature to pass a series of prison reforms, including the construction of Eastern State Penitentiary. The prison opened in 1826. Inmates were isolated to their cells nearly 24 hours each day, eating, working and recreating alone. Visitors weren’t allowed and the only reading material provided was a Bible. But rather than induce the spiritual awakening for which the prison was designed, Eastern State Penitentiary instead became an incubator for psychosis.

The prison was America’s first major public works project and almost instantly became an attraction for tourists, like Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville. Dickens in particular was abhorred by what he saw, writing, “I am persuaded that those who designed this system… do not know what it is they are doing… I hold the slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

Guards meted out arbitrary punishments like taking naked inmates outside during winter and dousing them with cold water. Some had their tongues chained to their wrist in a way that struggling would cause the tongue to tear.

By the early 20th Century, the policy of extreme isolation fell out of disfavor and the prison for the first time allowed inmates to work, eat and recreate together.

But it was the prison’s architecture more than the philosophy behind it that led more than 300 prisons worldwide to be modeled after it. The revolutionary hub-and-spoke design originally featured seven single-story cell blocks radiating out from a center octagonal-shaped tower. The prison was the first public building in America to have central heating, flush toilets and shower baths. However, it was the only prison in America to follow this design.

By the mid-20th Century, the compound was in shambles and, in 1971, was shuttered. For nearly 20 years the prison was left to rot before a group in the late 1980s successfully petitioned a Philadelphia mayor to spare the site from redevelopment. It opened as a tourist attraction in 1994.

The cooling towers at Three Mile Island nuclear plant loom over Middletown, PA.

The city of Okuma Japan has been evacuated indefinitely pending the outcome of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where the cooling system for at least two of three failing reactors have yet to be powered up more than a week after the area was rattled by a 9.0 earthquake then ravaged by a 33-foot tsunami. So far, nuclear meltdown has spared Japan, but the situation remains serious. As of tonight, engineers are considering whether they’ll have to entomb the plant’s No. 3 reactor in concrete, the ‘Chernobyl Option.’

Predictably, the crisis has raised questions about the safety and risks of nuclear power, which, as an industry, has made major inroads in recent years. Currently, America is home to 104 nuclear power plants. About twelve more plants were being considered when the tsunami struck Japan. Some pundits claim now that the industry, at least in America, is dead. China, meanwhile, intends on proceeding full-boar with its twenty-five planned nuclear plants over the coming years.

This past weekend I visited two of Pennsylvania’s nuclear communities, one being Frick’s Lock, the other Middletown, home to the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Coming into both places, you can see from miles out the plumes of water vapor rising from the cooling towers, which themselves rise above the tree line, offering an ominous visual cue that says, ‘You’re in the hot zone.”

Despite the partial meltdown in 1979, one of the reactors remains operational.

Around 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, nuclear coolant began escaping from a reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station when a valve refused to close. A series of subsequent malfunctions occurred over the next two hours, allowing the release of some 32,000 gallons of radioactive coolant. At 7 a.m., three hours after the initial incident, an emergency was declared and within days, some 140,000 people had evacuated the area.

The reactor was eventually brought under control, suffering only a partial meltdown of its No. 2 reactor core. The No. 2 reactor has since been dismantled, with its No. 1 reactor still in operation following years of disservice. Officially, the radiation released posed no health risks, although nuclear energy opponents have argued otherwise. Some scientists claim that communities downwind from the site saw spikes in infant mortality rates and lowered reproductive rates among livestock. During the 1980s and 90s, more than $82 million in compensation was paid out to those in the affected area, including $15 million to parents of children with birth defects.

In the 1960s, PECO (Philadelphia Electric Company), began making plans to build a nuclear power plant along the Schuykill Canal, on the other side of which was a small village called Frick’s Lock, which is now pointlessly listed on the National Register of Historic Places, since to see the buildings you have to first break the law.

The village is more than 250 years old, meaning some of its buildings pre-date America’s revolution. Its oldest was built in 1754. But by 1986, when the power plant went online, PECO evicted the remaining residents of Frick’s Lock, giving some of them just forty-eight hours’ notice. This action effectively turned Frick’s Lock into a ghost town of ten rotting buildings connected by overgrown sidewalks and unpaved road.

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