This entry was posted on 8/31/2006 9:57 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
Best tourists ever.
South Dakota
(August 24)
If your definition of best tourist emphasizes economy and efficiency we’d be somewhere depicted in the dictionary entry. After leaving MN, we swung through Falls Park in Sioux Falls, SD. As is the case with many stops along our route, this park was sneeze-at-able compared to the places we would soon encounter. But relative to its surroundings,
Falls Park felt novel and even spectacular.
The Park is situated on the Big Sioux River cascading over a series of eraser-red, Sioux quartzite (one of the hardest rocks in N. America) ledges. Always appreciative of irony, I enjoyed the fact that the falls once hosted a quartzite quarry worked by felons who were then forced to construct their jail from the same rock which they had so recently hewn from the riverside. Insult to injury.
On to Mitchell, SD, home of the
Corn Palace. We stopped for about five minutes at the Mitchell Corn Palace, this despite the annual festival in the streets around the semi-edible palace. In case you are ever in the area, here is a picture to save you the trip through town.
Mitchell is just one more unsightly SD town desperate to lure passers-by from the interstate. So they built this “palace” and plunked it down ten minutes from the interstate. I figure they must want us tourist-types to drive through their beautiful town and spend our cash at the various “fine dining establishments” and “shopping boutiques” besmirching the landscape. Note to self: drive on by next time.
We stopped by the
Minuteman Missile National Historic Site two hours down the road from Mitchell. This site commemorates the heyday of mutually-assured destruction during the Cold War arms race with the Soviets.
The ranger working the desk at what was a newly opened Park Service site, knew almost everything there is to know about Minuteman Missiles and nuclear weapon history. Plus he was from Georgia. His deep south accent and personality on the barren grasslands just outside the South Dakota Badlands kept me smiling, especially when he offered to show us a 15-minute video introducing us to the huge underground silos that formerly housed the glorious ICBMs. Turns out he directed, produced and starred in this film made with what appeared to be a Sony Handicam. We enjoyed the show. But since we had no reservations to actually go down into the missile silo we headed on to the Badlands.
The
Badlands boast a landscape of minutely carved hills and cliffs that follow the course (or former course) of the White River. These geological features are composed almost entirely of the softest of stone and clays. Veins overflowing with dark reds, oranges and yellows lace the highly eroded landscape.
At any stop along the road a curious driver can get out and attempt to climb anyone of the countless jetties of ancient clay and stone. While most often the going is straightforward and easy, some inclines are ready to give way beneath the climber’s feet. And beware the terrible winds. One park ranger informed us that the winds often climb into the 50 mph range in the winter. Today it seemed that windy. As we climbed a trail up one of the higher hillsides we felt as if a gust could reach out and shove us over the edge on the slightest whim.
Once you reach the top of the carved cliff or hill you are on what is essentially a flat prairie land, an eery experience after hiking up in a landscape covered with colorful carved hillsides. We enjoyed the Badlands because the landscape was approachable. Grand, but not too grand. Huge, but not yet incomprehensible. It would be a suitable introduction to increasingly monumental landscapes that have the power to leave your head spinning or at least stun you into a kind of coma that makes appreciating the rugged and wild nearly impossible.
Wall DrugThe billboards on I-90 in South Dakota: tacky, entertaining, and offensively desperate. They do break the monotony of the South Dakota flatlands, making drive time pass quickly, but one is nearly infuriated by their manipulative pleas (and outright commands) to stop at the Petrified Fossil Garden.
And yet, we fell prey. The owners of
Wall Drug are decidedly OCD. They have a billboard in Nairobi, Kenya advertising their drug store/mall in podunk SD (and another in rural SD telling you so). Wall population: 818 (half of which are eastern European employees of Wall Drug). But after miles and hundreds of their tacky billboards, our curiosity demanded a visit. One point for Wall Drug.
And don’t forget our favorite bill board in SD: Dick’s Garage, “24 Toe Service.”
But we had to stop at Wall Drug. It was, after all, right after the Badlands, on the way to the Black Hills. 513 billboards had the desired effect. On a scale of Mitchell Corn Palace to Badlands it is about a 5.3. And since most everything else in SD is a 2.1, a 5.3 is bigtime. Wow, are the owners ever obsessive compuslive. The complex cropped up from nowhere in this tiny town and stretched for two blocks in both directions.
A 500 seat café, 83 unique trinket, western-wear, outdoors and you-name-it shops, a playground, fountain, and you get the picture. And most importantly, so much attention to detail. We couldn’t turn a corner without the decor demanding that we stop and read or soak in the carvings, plaques, pictures, taxidermy, bones--for crying out loud–-anything that the proprietors could get their grubby hands around. Alyssa almost couldn’t handle it.
We bought a few 49 cent pieces of camping flatware and drove west on I-90 for our campground in the Black Hills. It was getting dark. We were now professional tourists.
