South Dakota Trip: Iconic

Warning: long blog post full of photos ahead.

Little known secret: Mount Rushmore is only a six-hour drive away from Denver. I was skeptical when I was first told that, but it's true. We decided to carve out three days this past July to head northeast to South Dakota's Black Hills and the Badlands. I have to say that this was one of the most amazing trips I've ever taken and we will most definitely be going back again sometime across the next couple of years. 

Our first day was ridiculously amazing. We got up early, loaded up the car, and drove through Wyoming and Nebraska to South Dakota. (You can do the trip just going through Wyoming, but it's only an extra fifteen minutes or so to take the Nebraska route, and then my kids were able to say they'd been to Nebraska :)). The route from Colorado into Wyoming is a major freeway, so we moved too quickly for me to photograph the "Welcome to Wyoming" sign, but we were the only car for miles across the other two state borders so I was able to stop and capture those signs:

 

Right before we crossed into South Dakota we came across these two at the side of the road:

We arrived in South Dakota in the afternoon, having stopped in Cheyenne, WY, for brunch and in Nebraska for a bathroom break. We toured The Mammoth Site, which is an odd but fantastic place. It's an active dig, but is encased inside an enormous building, so it has a little bit of a fake feel to it even though it is all too real. 

As we headed north, we discovered that Wind Cave National Park was closed due to a fire in the area, so I quickly re-planned our afternoon and evening. We drove into Custer State Park, which is, hands down, the best park visit I've ever done. The landscape is beautiful, with hills covered with vegetation and some open spaces between. The amount of wildlife in the park is astonishing. We saw lots of pronghorn, deer, wild turkeys, and bison. The bison were incredible. We saw a herd crossing the road and then came across another herd grazing on both sides of the road. They were literally feet away from our car. We saw males jockeying for position, babies nursing, and an idiot tourist who got out of his car to photograph the herd (thankfully, he did not get hurt!). The storm clouds kept coming in and out so the lighting is really different in these photos depending upon where the clouds were at the moment.

There's also a herd of burros in the park. I read later that they are descended from the pack animals that were used by the gold miners in the area. They are really aggressive about food, so much so that if you drive through with an open window (or two) they will put their head in your car to check out what you have (look closely at the photo - driver and passenger sides).

We got out of our car and petted the burros. Many people were feeding them, but I thought that was a bad idea and told my kids no, they couldn't feed the burros pretzels from the car. While Sadie and I were off petting a couple of the animals, another kid gave Eli food to feed the burros and Seth snapped some photos of him doing that. Let's just say the disciplinarian in me came out when I found out about it. I felt upset (and vindicated) when I read in a guidebook we picked up later that tourists are not to feed the burros.

It was looking stormy at that point so we decided to head to Mount Rushmore. The drive between Custer State Park and Mount Rushmore is both breathtaking and terrifying. When we arrived, the rain was off in the distance and there was a rainbow visible from the parking lot (it was really cloudy, so while it was a great in-person experience it didn't translate well on camera). As we approached Mount Rushmore through the walkway lined with state flags, Eli said to me, "Wow! That's iconic!" I did a split-second internal giggle and was about to comment on his choice of words when Eli realized he'd said something grown-up, put up his hands, wiggled them, and said "Vocabulary Man!" We had a good laugh, but wow, was there truth in that comment. After having only seen photos of Mount Rushmore before it was really something else to see it in person.

We stayed there for a bit and took photos, but then the thunder rolled in so we went to the museum on site and then bought books for the kids about the construction of Mount Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. We had dinner at the restaurant on-site and then got ice cream cones to eat while we attended the night lighting ceremony. There were some technical difficulties, as a bolt of lightning from the storm had damaged the sound system, but they got it up and running eventually.

Sadie's report on the day? "This is better than Montreal!" That's high praise coming from her, as she deemed Montreal our best trip ever (she loved the Jean Talon farmer's market, the Biodome, the Botanic Gardens, and walking through the old city). She quickly changed her mind, however, as the drive from Mount Rushmore to our hotel in Rapid City turned terrifying as we were caught at 9:30 at night in a blinding downpour turned hailstorm with lightning around us on all sides. Let's just say I'm glad Seth was at the wheel and heeded my pleas to pull over for a bit. It was still a white-knuckle kind of night. We were very grateful to arrive safely at our hotel and collapsed into bed.

We got up early the next morning, found a Starbucks, and headed east to the Badlands. We stopped at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site only to discover that it was neither the missile launch location nor the control center location, just a small museum. We got tickets there to go on the control center tour later in the afternoon and then headed south. About a mile later we happened across a "feed the prairie dogs" place and made Sadie the happiest kid on earth when we stopped and bought a bag of peanuts.

 

We proceeded from there into the Badlands. It was only about 10:00 am, but already over 100 degrees, so we spent most of the time in the car, getting out only briefly to take photos and check out the landscape more closely. The Badlands are breathtaking. Truly.

At the end of the scenic drive, we headed to Wall for lunch, and ate at the famous Wall Drug. (Truly a piece of Americana!) Their "backyard" is a crazy mix of oddities, including a giant jackalope that every tourist waits to sit on in order to be photographed. We couldn't buck tradition.

 

We scooted out of Wall and headed to our missile control center tour, where my children learned everything they didn't already know about the Cold War and where Seth and I were blown away (don't worry, not literally) by the Cold-War-era art.

 

The kids were hot and whiny so we went back to Wall and Wall Drug for ice cream and a quick trip to the Wounded Knee Museum. Word to the wiser than me: don't bring children there. My kids know a lot of history, but even though they already knew about the tragedy of Wounded Knee, the exhibit was very heavy. We all cried. Sadie had a great takeaway, though. She told me that even though it made her sad (and especially sad as she connected the story with her best friend, who is Lakota Sioux) she knew it was important to remember the story so that it would never happen again and so that we could remember the people who died there. We went back to the Badlands after that and drove through part of the Badlands again and then into the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

 
We saw lots of pronghorn and did the dirt road drive up to Sheep Mountain Table. I thought we'd already been to amazing places, but that was an awe-inspiring experience. We were the only people there, the view was vast and breathtaking, and there was a stillness, a quietness there that I've never before experienced. Even when the breeze blew and the grasses moved there was nothing to be heard save for the sounds we made. I wanted to bottle the feeling of peace I had there and bring it home with me to let out in the moments of hustle and bustle and stress that define the majority of our time at home. 

 

We then drove a bit into the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

 

I had never before been on a reservation, and the gravity of U.S. history and pre-U.S. history really hit me in the gut there. I'm still wrestling with the emotions and thoughts this trip evoked and provoked and probably will continue to wrestle with those for the rest of my life. Along those lines, this abandoned storefront just outside the border of the reservation was astonishing:

The northwestern part of the reservation is not very heavily populated so when it got to be nearly 7:30 and we hadn't found a town big enough to have a restaurant we decided to head back to Rapid City, where we had a very late dinner two hours later and collapsed in bed yet again. 

On the third day, we packed up and headed home via the scenic Needles Highway through the northern part of Custer State Park.

  
We snapped a photo of Crazy Horse out of the window as we blew past it, stopped in Custer for lunch (and took photos next to sculptures of bison), and headed south through Wyoming (stopping in Cheyenne for Seth's obligatory "I've been in a state capital" photo, a Starbucks run, and photos next to sculptures of cowboy boots).

  
And then we crossed into Colorado and headed home.

Now do you see why I want to go back?