Badlands and the Black Hills

After having our first taste of buffalo for dinner, we spent Monday night in Kadoka, SD, which positioned us well to start Tuesday in Badlands National Park.

Once the bed of a shallow but enormous ocean that spread over the Great Plains, as evidenced by the many fossils of ancient aquatic life it has yielded, the Badlands National Park is now known for the rugged and beautiful rock formations that have been sculpted by centuries of wind. Alas, in 500,000 years or so the wind will have blown the soft rock away completely, returning the land to the plain it originally was 500,000 years ago.

In the meantime, the formations are quite a sight, not only for their shape but also for their layers of color.

Michael slept through our drive through the Park, which meant that Em and I had to take turns getting out at the designated overlooks. And since Michael sleeps best when the van is in motion, those stops were few.

The loop through the Badlands empties into the town of Wall, which is best known for its large drug store. Anyone's who's stopped at South of the Border on I-95 in South Carolina will have an idea of what Wall Drug is like, not only because it relishes its own tackiness but because we started seeing signs for Wall Drug about a hundred miles prior to its exit off I-90.

Still, Michael seemed to have a good time saddling up...

...and getting to know some of the locals.

From there we continued to Mount Rushmore. As you approach the entrance, you can catch glimpses of the sculpture, and once inside the park, there is a long approach that leads you to an open square from which you can behold the memorial.

It was a fantastic sight, but even at this distance it was hard to appreciate the scale of the faces, which are sixty feet tall. I kept thinking about the climactic scene in North by Northwest where Cary Grant is hanging on to Washington's face (alas, not filmed on location but on a studio replica).

I didn't want to get that close, but it was hard to get a good perspective from so far below. The museum beneath the square helped by running footage of the workers, suspended by rope, drilling, chipping and blasting.

Leaving Mount Rushmore, we drove south to Custer State Park where we embarked on the "Wildlife Road," with high hopes of seeing some buffalo. Initially, we encountered some mules, which we didn't find too exciting and could not understand why the van in front of us (Minnesota plates) was encouraging the mules to nose around inside the windows. Later we saw some deer and some prairie dogs, which were very cute.

Then at last we came around a bend and right into a herd of buffalo. There were hundreds of them.
That was the good news. The bad news was that they were congregating right at an intersection and snarling traffic there. Plus Michael was crying. Still they were wonderful to see up close!

Our last stop before heading to our hotel in Sundance, WY, was the Crazy Horse Memorial, which is not too far from Mount Rushmore. (We just took a long detour south.) One of the sculptors of Rushmore was invited by the Lakota to design and begin the memorial and now more than fifty years later, they have a long way to go.

Here is the plan for the final sculpture. You can definitely see the rockface taking shape, but there is a lot of granite yet to be cleared. Expected completion date is sometime before the last of the Badlands has been blown away.