Saturday, July 18, 2009 – It DOES get hot in South Dakota
Today we arrived in South Dakota for our very first BIG vacation of 2009. We decided to spend our first day in and around Rapid City. We first headed downtown to see the “City of President’s” – a display of life-size bronze statues. Seems that with Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota has deemed itself THE place to see president’s – there is this “City,” there is a wax museum, and there is a park with busts of the President’s heads (we stopped with the "city" and Mount Rushmore!). There are 32 of the 45 US President's represented and I think Joe was slightly offended that men like Zach Taylor and Benjamin Henry Harrison were represented, but Abraham Lincoln was not.
After having lunch, we stopped for a peek at Art Alley. It’s an alley where local artists are invited to come and graffiti the walls. Some of the artwork was really quite good!!!
From downtown, we headed to Skyline Drive – a drive up around a mountain that looks out over Rapid City (the mountain actually splits the town). Up on top is Dinosaur Park. This is clearly for kids, but we stopped anyway because South Dakota is where Sue (from the Field Museum in Chicago) was found and, therefore, has some room to boast about dinosaurs (IMHO). I took a couple of pictures and then we headed back in to town.
We still had a little time before we could check in to the B & B, so we went to the Chapel in the Hills, a “stave church” that is a re-creation of a church in Norway and is actually quite beautiful. We saw the inside of the chapel and it was absolutely beautiful. The grounds were also quite pretty and the volunteers there were very nice and helpful.
NOW, it was time to check-in to our B & B. We are thrilled with where we are. Willow Springs B & B is located in the Black Hills and run by Joyce and Russell Payton. It’s a beautiful location with only 2 cabins. It is quiet and peaceful. After checking in to our B & B, we got acquainted with the area. We sat outside in the chairs and enjoyed the peace and quiet and cooler temperatures.
Sunday, July 19, 2009 – HAPPY 6th ANNIVERSARY
Today we headed to Mount Rushmore and I must say it is quite an impressive site. It sits higher on the mountain than I expected – I guess because most pictures you see of it are not looking UP at it, but are from helicopters or planes that are more eye-level with it. We took in all there was to see there. We walked the President’s Trail, which takes you to the closest viewing point you can get to and has stops along the way that talk about each of the Presidents represented on the mountain. We also stopped at the sculpture’s studio, where we saw a bust of what the mountain was originally supposed to look like (the president’s were originally going to be carved to their waists) and some of the equipment used to create the masterpiece. We also learned a lot about how the sculpture was completed – the dynamite, which was used for 90% of the work; the “honeycomb” where they drilled rows of smaller holes to chip away at the granite; and the busts of the President’s head that were used by the sculptors to help them feel what the faces should look like. We now have approximately 1 bazillion pictures of Mount Rushmore from every angle you can view it from.
From Rushmore, we headed to Custer State Park, which is primarily known for its herd of bison (we call them buffalo, of course). And we saw lots of them. The drive was quite beautiful and included several “pigtail bridges” which I found to be quite interesting. You drive under the bridge, then circle back over it, which replicates a curly pigs tail.
Our next stop was Wind Cave. Wind Cave was discovered when two men saw an opening in the land and when they peered over it, the wind was blowing so hard, it blew one of their hats off. We took the Natural Cave Entrance Tour where we saw that hole they found and then we went down, down, down into the middle of the cave. The cave is 132 miles long, but most of that is stacked on top of each other. It is not a pretty cave, but is known for its “boxwork.” Sediment filled in the cracks and crevices of the limestone that covered this area hundreds of years ago. When the weak limestone was washed away by water, it left this boxwork behind. Even though the boxwork is made of the same material as the limestone, it was so compacted into the cracks and crevices that it did not give way. There is also a phenomenon there called “popcorn” which looks like the crap we are trying to remove from our ceilings at home. It is created by the dripping water (kind of like stalactites and stalagmites that you see in other caves).
Boxwork:
Popcorn:
After dinner in Custer, SD, we drove the Needles Highway, which is named for the fingerlike spires that line the road. It twists and turns and was another absolutely beautiful drive.
Monday, July 20, 2009 – Oh my gosh, the WIND BLOWS here!!!!
Today we had reservations for the Minuteman Missile at 1:30PM. It’s quite a drive, so we headed straight there after breakfast. We ended up with a little time to kill, so we stopped in Wall at the Wounded Knee Museum. Wounded Knee is a famous attack on the Indians that happened in 1890. Some speculate that is was retaliation for Little Bighorn, where Custer was defeated 14 years prior. The museum did not have artifacts, but only a lot of writing and photographs. (I will refer to the Euro-Americans at the “white men” and the Native Americans as “Indians” – no disrespect intended to either party.) I learned a few things there: I didn’t realize that the white man had forcibly denied the Indians the right to stick to their own culture – they wanted them “westernized” because they were afraid of their ceremonies and traditions. I also didn’t know that the white man was largely responsible for the near demise of the bison. This happened because the white man was hunting bison for sport and then leaving the dead carcass behind. This took away the Indians primary source of food, but instead of stopping the sport hunting, they tried to force the Indians to be farmers. Of course when it was all said and done, the white man forced the Indians onto reservations. It’s all really very sad to me.
Our next stop was the Minuteman Missile appointment. This was a most interesting tour. The tour was in 2 sections – the Delta 1 missile launch control facility and the Delta 9 missile silo. The tours are limited, so I was very glad that I had made reservations. We had to caravan from the visitor center to the launch control facility and then on to the missile silo. Our first stop was the launch control facility. We learned so much about how this all worked. The men there worked in 3-day shifts – there 3 days, back at the base 3 days, etc. Their biggest enemy was boredom (we guessed Russia and the weather). There were several people there – a facilities maintenance manager, security guards, a cook, and there were 2 people in the bunker at all times on 24-hour shifts. We were told that the nuclear warheads in each of the 150 missiles that were located in South Dakota from the 60s until 1994 were 120 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. The two men in the bunker would have been responsible for sending the missiles if need be, but all the missiles could have been deployed from any of the 3 launch control facilities. Additionally, there was a plane in the sky for 36 consecutive years, called the Looking Glass, which also could have deployed the missiles if necessary (not the same plane, of course, but a plane in the sky all the time). If deployed, the missiles would have reached their targets in the USSR in 30 minutes. At the launch facility, we saw the bunker where the famous keys were. If initiated, the 2 men would use their own respective combination locks to unlock the keys and the launch code. Each man would then put their key in the hole and turn at the same time. Ignition of the missiles required 2 keys to be turned at the exact same time and the keys were 12 feet apart to insure that no one man could activate the missiles on their own.
We do still have active missile silos, but not in South Dakota. They are all in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota and are the Minuteman III variety. From the launch control facility, we drove to a missile silo that was left for tourist purposes. The warhead is a fake, for obvious reasons, but you can look down into the silo and see what the missiles looked like. The other 149 missile silos were imploded when the Cold War ended.
From our Minuteman Missile tour, we made a stop at the Prairie Homestead. This was the home of Edgar and Alice Brown, who homesteaded this place back in 1909. The Homestead Act provided that the head of a family could file on 160 acres for a fee of $18.00. To keep the land, they had to make improvements and 10 acres had to be farmed within 6 months of the date of filing. Due to the extreme conditions of the area (very hot summers and very cold winters) most of the homesteaders ended up abandoning their claims. Most of the homestead here is original. It does look like pretty rough living, I must admit.
The next stop was Badlands National Park. The park is really interesting in that there are layers on layers of rock, somewhat similar to the Grand Canyon. The entire park was at one time underwater and the layers of sediment left behind are what create the layers we see today. There is not a lot of hiking at this park, but we managed to do 3 short hikes just inside the parks gate. The first one was the Door Trail and we got a real taste of the terrain by following the trail markers. It is very rocky and barren and reminded me in ways of hiking the lava field, but mostly because we weren’t following a trail, we were looking for trail markers!! After the Door Trail, we walked the Window Trail, which was actually a boardwalk and more of a scenic overlook than a hike. Finally, we did the Notch Trail. This hike took us up a shaky ladder that was at a 45 degree angle to an overlook.
You can see the ladder if you close at this picture:
As far as the weather today – it was windy. Really, really, really, really windy. But, that wasn’t such a bad thing because it kept the temperature bearable.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 – Back to the Black Hills
Today we headed back into the Black Hills stopping first to see the Crazy Horse Monument. I would be remiss if I did not mention that we did make a point to see Clinton Rock and take a few pictures, but that’s all I have to say about that.
Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument to the Oglala Lakota Warrior that was instrumental in the defeat of General Custer at Little Bighorn. It is pretty close (8 miles) to Mount Rushmore, but is far, far from being finished. The project began in 1948 and I doubt it will be completed in our lifetime. Unlike Rushmore, it is planned to be a 3-dimensional, in that it will be viewable from 3 sides. It is monumentally bigger than Rushmore, as well. The sculptor who began the project was Korczak Ziolkowski who had worked on Mount Rushmore with Gutzon Borglum in 1924. He died in 1982, but seven of his ten children, along with his wife, continue to work on the project. It seemed to me that not much progress has been made, but when you see the movie at the Indian Museum of North America there on the grounds, you can see that a LOT of mountain has been blasted away. The face is complete and the arm is in progress, but you can see from the bust of what it will look like that they are years from completion.
Deadwood was our next stop, famous for being the site of Wild Bill Hickok’s death and where he is buried. Before we left for vacation, we started watching the HBO Series by the same name and learned a little about the place. Deadwood was a rough and rowdy place, with a wild and lawless reputation. We learned that a lot of characters from the HBO series really existed, including Seth Bullock, a sheriff from Montana who opened a hardware store and the less than noble, Al Swearengen who was really the owner of a place called the Gem. Now days, Deadwood is mostly a gambling town. You can go into the saloon where Wild Bill was shot and see his “death chair.” You can also go to the Mt. Moriah Cemetery and see the graves of Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009 – Journey into Wyoming
We started our morning at Jewel Cave for the Scenic Tour. We had made reservations for this tour after learning that they were selling out when we were at Wind Cave. Jewel Cave allows you to buy tickets 7 days in advance, so while I had some roaming cell phone service in Rapid City on Monday, I called and made reservations. The tour was pretty interesting. We saw some cool things in the cave, including a “soda straw” and an “egg” which I had not seen in another cave – at least as far as I remember. The cave is lined with calcite crystals, which is where it gets its name because when light is on these crystals they look like jewels.
Soda Straw:
Egg:
From Jewel Cave, we drove into Wyoming and north to Devil’s Tower, which was the first declared United States National Monument. Officially, Devil’s Tower is a “monolithic igneous intrusion or volcanic neck.” We just thought it was a really cool tower. Ha!!! We did the hike around the base of it and looked up at it from all sides. We saw some climbers – they say about 400,000 crazy people climb the tower every year. The tower is well-known for being in the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind which will surely make our Netflix list when we get home.
On the way “home” we stopped in the town of Belle Fourche, SD (pronounced Bell Foosh). In 1959, after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union as a states, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey officially designated a point 20 miles north of Belle Fourche as the is the geographic center of the United States (Lebanon, Kansas is the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states). The city of Belle Fouche has a granite monument to that designation, but we decided to drive up to the REAL geographic center. It is 7 miles down a gravel road and designated by a flag, that really should be replaced as it is getting rather tattered. It was kind of fun winging it and driving up trying to find it. We first started down the wrong gravel road, but I quickly figured out it was the wrong one and we went back. I was a little leery of climbing through the barbed-wire fence and going to the flag, but I could see from the path that a LOT of people had done it, so I figured what the heck. We had no problem – in fact, we never even saw another human being the whole time we were stopped! It turned out to be one of Joe’s favorite stops on the whole trip.
The Monument:
The REAL spot:
Thursday, July 23, 2009 – We say “goodbye” to our lovely B & B
Today we "checked out" of our lovely B & B that we have so enjoyed. We never had to turn the air conditioner on the entire stay. We slept with the door and windows opened and never locked the door the whole time we were there. We sat in the hot tub twice and did a little hiking (Joe more than me) around the property. It was just such a nice and relaxing place. I can’t say enough about how much we enjoyed our choice.
Today we took a LONG drive, through the corner of Wyoming and into Montana to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was after 3:00PM by the time we arrived and boy was it hot – the hottest day of our entire trip. At one time the thermometer on the car said it was 102!!
We arrived there in time for a Ranger talk at 4:00, which was very interesting. He was very informative about the battle (although I don’t think I’ll go into all that detail here) and about some of the assumptions that have been made about it. In the end, 52% of the 7th Cavalry was killed (16 officers including Custer and 242 troopers). Indian casualties were never determined. The battlefield holds a white marker where each cavalry member fell. They have also begun placing red granite markers for the warriors who fell during the battle. There is a 5-mile road that takes you through the major parts of the battle and 2 trails. We did the drive and both trails while we were there and learned a lot about the bloody battle. There is also a national cemetery there, Custer National Cemetery where soldiers of several wars are buried. Custer’s body, although originally buried on the battlefield, was later removed and is buried at West Point.
Where General Custer fell:
Friday, July 24, 2009 – Wrapping it Up
We decided that we would use Friday to wrap up what we hadn’t done during the week. We visited Sturgis, home of the huge motorcycle rally. We went to the Harley Davidson store and also went to the Motorcycle Museum and Hall of Fame, which just seemed like something we should do because I’m pretty sure I’ll never be in Sturgis, SD again. We had lunch and checked Sturgis off our list.
Our final stop was the Wounded Knee Massacre Site. Joyce (from the B & B) had warned us that it was just a monument, but we decided to go anyway. She was right – it was just a monument. The most interesting, but sad, thing was driving through the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Although Pine Ridge is the eighth largest reservation in the U.S., it is the poorest reservation. Unemployment on the reservation hovers around 80% and 49% live below the poverty level. It was incredibly sad to see how these people live. They say that many people have no electricity, telephone, running water, or sewer and that the reservation has the shortest life expectancies of any group in the Western Hemisphere.
The monument site is at the mass grave of the victims in a cemetery at the top of a hill. It is surrounded by a fence. An Indian there speaking to another tourist said that the government would like to purchase the land from the Indians to make it a National Historic Site, but they want to move the mass grave and I think, overall, the Indians are opposed to selling. I couldn’t find anything online about this, but I don’t doubt it to be true.
Saturday, July 25, 2009 – Heading Home
On Saturday, we started out our day by visiting the South Dakota Air and Space Museum. We had decided at the beginning of the week that we would do this on Saturday. There is a B1 Bomber on display there since Ellsworth Air Force Base is a B1B facility. There were a few interesting planes there (according to Joe – I wouldn’t know myself!!). While we were there, we learned that we could take a tour of Ellsworth AFB, so we decided to go ahead and do that. The tour included the training missile silo that was used when the 150 missile silos were active in South Dakota. Other than that, we drove around the AFB and saw how the military families live in this city within a city.
B1B:
Our flight home was fairly uneventful. The morning flight had been delayed several hours, but our flight (which left at 1:30) was on-time and went off without a problem. When we got to Denver, we learned that our flight was oversold by 17 and so we let them buy us off with a voucher for a free round-trip ticket to anywhere in the 48 contiguous states. Ha!!! 3 free trips off one trip on United. Seems a little ridiculous, but we’ll keep playing the game to keep having great trips like this one to South Dakota was!!!
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