The Badlands are Great Lands!

After breakfast at our hotel, we only drove 100 feet before my first picture of the day. This deer, made of car parts and rusty tools, perched on a squashed car in front of the gas station near the hotel. While Phillip got gas, I scampered across the parking lot to get my pictures. I found out about the car parts deer during my research for the trip when I came across the website “Roadside America.” If you’re heading somewhere and want to find small, quirky attractions worth a drive by, Roadside America is a good source. Another good source for information about attractions near a destination is the website "Trip Advisor."

Phillip and I continued west toward the Badlands, watching for more interesting sites. We’ve frequently seen fairly large bee hive clusters like these as we’ve driven in South Dakota, more than we’ve noticed in the other states. We would expect with all the alfalfa fields that bees would be plentiful here, but I didn’t realize until I checked that South Dakota is the third leading state in the country in honey production. FYI, North Dakota is the #1 state for honey production. We saw these hives as we drove to the Minuteman Missile visitors’ center. From the early 1960s until 1991, South Dakota was home to 150 missile silos, each armed with a missile pointed at the Soviet Union. The next available tour of the control center museum wasn’t for over two hours, so we continued on.

About three miles south, we came across the Prairie Homestead. It is a preserved actual

homestead as settled originally in 1909. During 1900 thru 1913, a lot of this area was homestead by settlers who got 160 acres for $18. This was one of the last areas subject to homesteading, and probably one of the least successful in the country. 90% of the homesteaders here abandoned the area after two years or less. The winters were very harsh on the ill-prepared settlers. The people who settled at the site we visited, however, were successful. In 1949, the last son moved to California and the place ended up abandoned. It was still in good shape, though, when the preservationists came, so it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and preserved.

The Prairie Homestead has several buildings, including the original sod home with an addition from about 1915, a deserted claim shack that the homesteader took apart and rebuilt to be the family living room. The site had a cave dug into the hill that served as a refrigerator in the summer and a place to keep food and milk from freezing in the winter. The folks who run the Prairie Homestead have a pony and goats on site and chickens in the original chicken coop. Prairie dogs, probably descendants of the same prairie dogs that were a nuisance to the homesteaders, live in their burrows around the site.

About 8 miles south of the Prairie Homestead, we paid our national park fee and entered the Badlands National Park area. Spectacular is the word to describe the Badlands. It is the most amazing site we’ve seen on our trip. I’m going to just put the pictures in and continue with the narrative after, because the pictures are better than my words.

We stopped at numerous overlooks to take pictures; however, we walked a lot at the location called the Door Trail. The Badlands were formed by water erosion that exposed layers in the rock. Imagine being a settler in a wagon, making your way across the prairie, and coming upon 244,000 acres of this!

 

After spending several hours in the Badlands, we headed for the town of Wall and ate lunch at Wall Drug. Wall Drug is no longer just a drugstore, it is a multi-block destination. Phillip and I both had a buffalo burger, then we walked around the Wall Drug attractions. I’m not actually driving a wagon, it’s just a display on which tourists like us could sit and take pictures. We didn’t buy any souvenirs here, but we did notice that the petrified wood pieces on sale here cost three times what we paid for them yesterday at the Petrified Garden. Wall Drug had stuffed bison, a large animated dinosaur, a fake mine trail, and other activities for kids.

Wall Drug was very crowded, so we were happy to get away. To avoid any more crowds, I

navigated us to the west Sage Rim Road of the Badlands, instead of heading west on the interstate freeway. I figured not many people would use that road as it was longer and was the “‘scenic route.”  Yes it was scenic and yes, we only saw about four cars in the forty miles of the road. Also, the pavement ended about eight or so miles in. Our baby was used to Jack County gravel roads, so she did just fine. The gravel road was packed, dry, and wide.

In addition to more views of the Badlands, our scenic route also yielded the following sights.

We returned to a paved road and made our way to Rapid City, where we were finally able to get a new air filter for the SUV. The oil change people in Kansas had shown us that we needed a new one, but no auto parts store along our route (and we stopped at several) had one in stock for the Mitsubishi. Not a popular make of car here, I guess. It was probably for the best that it was after the thirty miles of dusty gravel that we found the new filter. We initially planned to spend the night in Wall, but the crowds there drove us on the Rapid City to spend the night.