Badlands 17 June 2010

Originally we thought we'd be able to take in the Badlands while at Mount Rushmore but alas that proved to be just too far away so we made a slight change to our itinerary and left Rushmore a day early and headed for the Badlands. Traveling east on Hwy 90 towards the Badlands we stopped in Wall, SD at famous Wall Drug located in the middle of nowhere, coined as the “World’s Largest Drug Store” which is the #1 Roadside Attraction in America. There are signs for it everywhere!! It’s been around since 1931 and has evolved in to 76,000 sq ft of attractions to include a 520 seat restaurant. It was during the depression that the wife of the pharmacist came up with the idea to offer free ice water to the weary travels coming across the plains before they had to close the doors of their little pharmacy…it caught on and the rest is history. The pharmacy is actually small but the rest is like one big emporium of many buildings offering almost any kind of souvenir one could possibly think of! On a summer day it draws as many as 20,000 people! We piled in there just like the rest of the curious travelers to include a parade of tour buses, RVs, bikers and cars. Oh well, we are tourists you know!! Wall is actually on one end of the 27 mile SD240 loop that meanders through the extraordinary formations known as the Badlands, located in the southwestern part of SD and about 80 miles from Mount Rushmore. The park consists of nearly 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest, protected mixed grass prairie in the U.S. It is the bottom of the sea that once was when the Earth’s climate was warmer and stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from western Iowa to western Wyoming. It covered a region we call the Great Plains. The park contains the world’s richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds dating 23 to 35 million years old. It is very hard to explain what we saw and even somewhat harder to capture it in photos. There is so much history here and the landscapes compose only the starkest elements of nature. They speak to the fundamentals of our planet, Wind, Rock and Sky. It is desolation at its truest. It is vast, and seemingly timeless. It is a study in erosion since erosion is at an inch every year. We stayed at the Badlands/White River KOA which was very peaceful on 31 acres with 650 mature trees to include the cottonwoods that were exploding sending their soft white cotton like balls falling in the gentle winds over the campgrounds. We enjoyed our short stay there as did the boys...they just LOVED running wild in the fields!