The Badlands of South Dakota don’t exactly look hospitable from any angle, but scanning them from the air reveals areas that look more like the Moon or Pluto than the Earth – barren fields surrounded by eroded cliffs and pockmarked by deep craters. And then, oddly enough, a crosshair target populated with the remains of more than 70 old cars.
Located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, several miles northeast of Kyle, South Dakota, the 500-foot diameter area is reportedly the last remaining of multiple sites on the former Badlands Bombing Range that used cars to aid practice bombing runs. Or, more accurately, the body shells of cars – now weathered, overturned and nearly flattened.
In August 1942, the Army Air Force carved the bombing range out of more than 300,000 acres of land acquired by eminent domain from the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, forcing the relocation of about 125 families. In place of farms and homesteads, the Army Air Force operating out of nearby Rapid City Army Air Base (now Ellsworth AFB) designated dozens of bombing targets and laid out a number of navigational beacons in a landscape largely devoid of features such as towns, cities, roads, and highways.
That empty landscape, which makes it difficult to locate the site today on satellite maps, equally made it difficult for pilots to determine the boundaries of the bombing range. So the Army Air Force gathered old car bodies and oil drums – the former apparently from area junkyards, given their lack of drivetrains and chassis – painted them yellow and arranged them out in the Badlands. Some accounts even note that giant reflectors were installed alongside the cars and oil drums to give pilots something more to navigate by, thus one common nickname for the site – Reflector City.
Photo by Jerry Penry.
Some of the cars were treated as targets, hit with practice bombs and shot through with large-caliber ammunition. After the conclusion of the war, when the North Dakota National Guard used the site until 1959, followed by the Strategic Air Command from 1960 through 1968, the cars continued to occasionally get pummeled with sand-filled practice bombs, rockets, and howitzer rockets.
The United States Air Force decommissioned the bombing range in 1968 and returned it to the tribe, but plenty of unexploded ordnance remains on and under the ground throughout the area, despite at least five cleanup projects conducted throughout the range from the 1960s through the 1990s.
Getting to the car graveyard on the bombing range even today takes some dedication. The closest roads are route 2 and route 44, though unnamed dirt roads and doubletracks – including one that cuts through the outer circle of the target – pepper the area. Anybody intrepid enough to reach the site, though, should have it to themselves for almost endless abandoned auto photo opportunities. For those not headed to the Badlands anytime soon, photographer Jerry Penry took the time to photograph every one of the cars in the target and post them to his website.
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