I'd arrived in Rapid City twelve hours before on assignment to check out Badlands National Park, one of my selections for a summer story on five lesser-known national parks. Prior to becoming a salaried travel editor with a little company called Time Inc. as a backer, my travel experiences had trended toward the dirtbag side. The central component to dirtbag travel is avoiding the costs of hotels and motels: $60-100 on a hotel room, or use that money for an extra three days of food and gas? I'll take the extra time everyday.

So when the mandate came down at work to "spend your money like it's yours" I took them literally. This national park trip would break single-season lows for expense reports.

Perhaps that explains how I ended up in Interior, South Dakota at the Horseshoe Bar looking for something to eat and drink. I'd planned to eat at a tiny cowboy saloon in a tiny town that could hold only one tiny cowboy saloon, but everything in Scenic, South Dakota was closed by the time I arrived. By 10 p.m. I had a diminishing pack of Twizzlers and no water. The place I'd planned to camp, a beautiful bluff overlooking the South Unit of Badlands National Park, seemed a bit dicey with the thunderstorms seen forty miles away threatening to wash out the dirt access road. So I drove through the darkness to Interior and found a grassland lighthouse: three letters shining in bright, fluorescent yellow to spell B-A-R.

photography: David Hanson

That's where I met Clint. He wore tight, faded jeans, a glittering rodeo belt buckle, and a torn blue button-up cowboy shirt, the kind that sells for $25 in hip vintage stores. His buddy and the only other person in the bar other than me and the bartender was Mitch, a Lakota Sioux Indian. Mitch and Clint grew up together, Clint as part of a ranching family and Mitch a member of the Lakota tribe on Pine Island Reservation.

At some point in these random travel encounters I get around to telling the folks that I'm a travel writer. This can have the hit-or-miss effect of opening the door to a myriad of article suggestions, usually centered around "the cutest little Victorian B&B and some great shops."

Tonight Clint offers to show me his ranch, "to see some of the country." He's considered opening a horse ranch for tourists and wants my opinion. A half hour later I'm following him in our trucks out dirt roads to the trailer where we stand outside and sip whisky from a small bottle: "Here, you need some of this." Overhead a domed, moonless ceiling of the thickest blanket of stars I've ever seen makes the night look silver. As my eyes adjust to the darkness I make out the soft shape of rolling hills covered in tall grasses. Clint's long, dark trailer is in front of us as we stand by his diesel pick-up. After talk of property rights and life on a large-scale family ranch, Clint points me to my room then heads to the other end of the trailer to sleep on his sheetless mattress in the master bedroom.