Day #67 - 5/18/2011 - Wall, South Dakota to Pierre, South Dakota - 179 miles

Our day started in Wall, South Dakota, meandered thusly through the Badlands, followed by a brief stop at the Minuteman National Historic Site and finished up in Pierre, South Dakota, 179 miles later.


Click on the scenic photos.

On our way out of Wall, we stopped at Wall Drugs, which was already teaming with tourists, like us.

OhMyGosh did I feel like a tourist inside here, but...it was kinda interesting. 
Apparently the $400,000 spent on highway billboards has made Wall Drugs
one of the biggest tourist attractions in North America. 

Did you know: if you look up tourist trap on Wikipedia, the first photo is a picture of a Wall Drug billboard?  The 3rd generation owner Ted Husted prefers the expression "roadside attraction" as he points out that admission and parking are free.  He has a point. 

There's even a multi-denominational chapel for the weary traveler.  Or the fresh traveler.

The hallways between the stores - essentially a 70,000 square foot indoor mall - were almost like a museum.  Wait, it wasn't almost...it was like a museum.  The art collection, which includes works by N. C. Wyeth, is worth more than $2.5 million dollars.

Museum quality collectibles from the early days when Wall Drug was simply a drugstore.

Wall Drug has about 200 employees and generates about $11,000,000 annually, receiving 20,000 visitors daily during the summer.  Crazy.

I thought the pharmacist's ingredients were  amusing, if not particularly effective.  Modern Medicine has come pretty far in 100 years. Next stop: personalized genomic medicine.  (Click on the photo to check out the detail.)

We walked through the indoor mall that is Wall Drug, looking at the souvenirs, admiring their donuts and, finally, moved on.  But, I'll tell you what...it was actually pretty interesting, especially the collection of Americana...like a folk/western museum.  I'd go back for that.  And a donut.

Anyway, off to the Badlands, which were just a few minutes from Wall.

So, it turns out that the expression "badlands" is generic, referring to a type of dry terrain where wind and water have eroded softer sedimentary rock and clay-rich soil.  Want to know what makes them so damned bad?  Read on.

There's some special about seeing wild animals in...ummm...the wild?  Yeah...the wild, in their native habitat...like this bighorn sheep ewe.  It's just cool.  You have to come here.

It seems that multiple cultures have weighed in on the concept of badlands.  The Lakota word for this area translates as, literally, "bad land".  To the French trappers, it was "les mauvaises terres à traverser", or "the bad lands to cross". The Spanish called it tierra baldía ("waste land") and cárcava ("gully"). The term badlands is also eponymous:  badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand...it's just bad for travel.   Maybe even bad to the bone.  B-B-B-B-Bad.

The main road through the park has a couple of side roads.  We took off on a 20 mile detour featuring one amazing view of the park after another.  The 64000+ acres in the distance is U.S. Wilderness Area;no vehicles, no roads, camping and hunting by permit.  BTW, this panorama is 25' wide.  Do you need one?  Or two?  Sadly, with the sun obscured by clouds, the colors are muted.  Silent.  I can neither see nor hear them.  The colors, that is.

The National Park Service lists 37 mammals in the park, ranging from the tiny shrew to the 1-ton bison.  What I thought was a mountain goat turned out to be bighorn sheep.

Wild sheep crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia during the Pleistocene era, about 750,000 years ago, spreading through western North America. The males have the big round horns.

Alone on an isolated piece of land, near a side road with only an occasional car, I enjoyed my quiet time with Ms. Ewe.

I think we were speaking each other's unspoken language.  At least until she ran away.

Driving slowly on the remote service road, we followed the signs to "Dog Town".   Lani saw them first:  dirt mounds a few yards away with little creatures poking their heads out.  They were none other than the Black Tailed Prairie Dog,  the burrowing rodent of the North American grassland, described by none other than Lewis and Clark Expedition in the journals and diaries of their expedition.  In 1901, scientists surveyed a single Texas "dog town" that covered an area of 25,000 square miles and contained an estimated 400,000,000 prairie dogs. Most ranchers-failing to appreciate their own poor livestock management skills- were convinced that prairie dogs were destroying rangelands and competing with cattle for food.  

Extensive poisoning programs virtually eradicated the prairie dog and many of its predators, chief among them the black-footed ferret. Formerly the prairie dog's most dangerous enemy (91% of the ferret diet is prairie dog!), ferret numbers have only recently been raised through captive breeding programs to a level where small populations are now being released back into the wild

Even though we saw buffalo up-close and pretty personal at Yellowstone, you know what they say about not being to see too many buffalo...the park has a ceiling of 600 buffalo to maintain an ecologically balanced grassland ecosystem during dry conditions.  During the 2007 annual buffalo round-up, "surplus" bison were donated to Native American Tribes in order to supplement herds throughout the country, often becoming supper.

Buffalo have no natural predators in the park.  We saw were they were, but not where they are.

In addition to simply preserving scenic splendor, the National Park Service plays a key role in the preservation of endangered species.  I think its my favorite government agency, right up there with the VA.  Hated by ranchers, the black-tailed prairie dogs enhance the diversity of vegetation, vertebrates, and invertebrates through their foraging and burrowing activities and by their presence as prey items.  (Note to self: avoid being in the middle of the food chain.)

The sale and trade of prairie dogs as exotic pets was banned between 2003 and 2008.  They are pretty cute.  Aren't you thinking about Caddyshack?

The road through the Badlands National Park provides one great vista after another.  The strata of the rock formations are chapters in geologic time.  The oldest layers are the black layers of shale at the very bottom.  They were deposited between 69-75 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period when a shallow, inland sea stretched across what is now the Great Plains.

Let's play a variation of "Where's Waldo?" called "Where's Lani?"  (Click on the photo and get a better view of those buttes)

The lighter colored Sharps Formation was primarily deposited from 28-30 million years ago by wind and water as the climate continued to dry and cool.  

Lani is outstanding on her butte.

The serrated appearance of the  Badlands started ½-million years ago when water began to cut down through the rock layers, carving fantastic shapes into what had been a flat floodplain. The Lakota were the first to discover large fossilized bones, fossilized seashells and turtle shells. The Lakota assumed - correctly - the area had once been under water, and that the bones belonged to extinct creatures.

Lani goes for a walk on a pretty big butte.

The Badlands erode at the rate of about 1"/year and will be gone in about 500,000 years.  The erosion continues to uncover fossils.  In 2010, a 7-year old girl who was part of a junior ranger program discovered the fossil of a mountain lion sized saber-tooth cat that lived in the Badlands over 30 million years ago.  

Lani and Bob were the butte of each other's jokes all day.

Big-horn sheep are one of  37 species of mammals at the Badlands.  If you've never seen them along a cliff, they are incredibly sure-footed.

Big-horn sheep scat.

Before the Lakota Indians, archaeological records combined with oral traditions indicate that the little-studied paleo-Indians, followed by the Arikara people camped in secluded valleys where fresh water and game were available year round. 

Eventually, the ravines will fill with sediment and the razor-like ridges will wash away into the prairies in the distance.

By one hundred and fifty years ago, the Great Sioux Nation ruled the Badlands until near the end of the 19th century as homesteaders moved into South Dakota.  The Wounded Knee Massacre was the last major clash between Plains Indians and the U.S. military until the advent of the American Indian Movement in the 1970

Bob has his own beautiful butte.

The road through the park usually gives you a view looking down on the ridges and prairies in the distance.  At other times, the road is flanked by the various strata, allowing you to look up from the past to the geologic present.

Looking up through scores of millions of years of the Earth's history.  It seems old, but it's the blink-of-an-eye in terms of the age of the Earth (5 billions years ) and the age of the Universe (13 billion years, plus or minus.)

With each rainstorm, more sediment is washed from the buttes. While the average erosion is an inch annually, sometimes a peak that had towered above the land; can be weakened by a storm causing it to crash to the ground.

One last look before we exited the Badlands National Park.  I'll have to return on a sunny day.

And, in one of the great ironic juxtapositions of National Park Service sites, you have the natural splendor of the Badlands right next to the badass Minuteman National Historic Site.  Established in 1999, the Minuteman National Historic Site preserves the last remaining Minuteman II ICBM system in the United States.  Nuclear tipped rockets...cool.   We had to stop.

It's nice to know that the men who had their fingers on the nuclear trigger had a sense of humor as they worried about their precious bodily fluids.  Dr. Strangelove would be pleased

Deactivated following the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) by President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the facilities represent the only remaining intact components of a nuclear missile field that once consisted of 150 Minuteman II missiles, 15 launch control centers, and covered over 13,500 square miles of southwestern South Dakota.

Well, unfortunately, the afternoon was already booked and while we did get to see a short, informative movie, we didn't get to see a Minuteman in its silo.  It was still cool and my inner-geek was satisfied.

Badlands and bad-to-the-bone missiles behind us, we made our way to Pierre, South Dakota, the final (?) day of the road-trip portion of our journey.  At least, that what we had planned.  The weather over the next week looked pretty grim with storms and winds in the forecast, but we were ready to get back on the bikes.  We made our way to our budget national motel of choice, the Super 8, cleaned up, and went looking for dinner.

South Dakota has two busted nuts, the other being in Draper.  We had other plans. 

Anyway, a word about Pierre, population=13646: founded in 1880, it lies on rough river bluffs overlooking the Missouri River.  Just a few miles away is Lake Oahe, one of the largest man made lakes in the world and a very popular fishing destination.  As for Pierre itself, not a whole lot going on.

The five most valuable agricultural products in South Dakota are cattle, corn, soybeans, wheat, and hogs.  No wonder that the Cattleman's Club Steakhouse is the #1 ranked restaurant in TripAdvisor. 

The Cattleman's Club takes steak seriously as cattle is the #1 industry in the state.  The menu is pretty much a paean to red meat, advising you to order your steak either medium-rare or medium.  If you order it medium-well or darker, the menu warns that you're on your own.  

We enjoyed separate salads and split a rare 16 ounce rib-eye.  The guy at the adjacent table looked like he had  a 24 ounce prime rib.  You can see the sawdust on the floor...nice ambiance and good food.

Sated, we returned to our room and prepared to return our rental car and get our bikes ready for the road.