Drove from Devils Tower to Rapid City to buy groceries. Thank God for the GPS (we call the female guiding voice "Bambi") in guiding us wherever we need to go! She always gets us to whatever service we need.
Anyway, after our Walmart stop, off to the Badlands. We will camp here for 2 nights. And when I say camp, I mean tent camp. Arrived early afternoon, and set up the tent. Hurray!! Ray and I did not kill each other in the process!! (Well, we ALMOST did, but succeeded with no bloodshed!!) In truth, a few harsh words were spoken, but we're still on speaking terms...(Just kidding!)
Badlands was just a few miles up the road, so once we were settled in, we went back up to the Visitor Center. There we watched a short movie that showcased people from around the area talking about reminiscences of growing up here, and the challenges of being neighbors to a National Park. Often private and public interests conflict. What the park sees as a natural enhancement to the park (the reintroduction of a species for example), sometimes the rancher sees as pests. A white-haired woman in her 70s who lived on the Pine Bluff reservation and runs a cafe there, bemusedly said that when vacationers come to her cafe, they want to see "Indians". She is a full blooded Sioux. Another man recalled that his father had homesteaded in 1916 here in South Dakota. The movie showed pictures of the rough hewn shack in which he grew up. His father was a Czech immigrant who wanted to make it in America. So they moved from Milwaukee and made their home here. He was born 6 years later, and has been here in the South Dakota plains ever since. But the idea you come away with after listening to all these voices, is that they love and embrace the wide open plains on which they live. What we see as an unimaginablie life, they see as the only life they would want to live.
To describe the Badlands for those who have never visited here, imagine the following. You've ridden for miles and miles seeing open , rolling plains to the horizon, and all of a sudden, you come upon a warren of jagged rocks, deep canyons, towering spires and flat-topped tables among the buttes--all in the middle of the plains. It really is worth the trip. We explored a few shorter trails for the rest of the afternoon, and will try a longer one tomorrow. One of he trails we started up took us ap a steep ladder to the top of a rocky area. We followed the trail along the very edge of the high rocky perch, when we came to a sign on the trail. "Dangerous area, keep to the right". Well, the "safe" area we were supposed to travel was a ledge about 2 feet wide, covered with loose gravel, with no handholds. Since we were about 100 feet up, and the passage looked VERY dicey, sanity ruled and we turned back.
Of note here, is the incredible wind. Ever since Glacier, the wind has been gusting. Even though we've slathered ourselves with spf50 sunscreen, I think we have windburn. Keeping a hat on your head is next to impossible unless you somehow tie it on. But the days have been sunny and very comfortable.
See photos of the day here.
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