Badlands

Back in the 60s, my dad's best friend took a sabbatical from teaching to pursue an advanced degree. He ended up getting his degree from a university in Wisconsin and they ended up taking the entire family back for the year. When they returned his son, my friend had new decal stickers, one of which was from Badlands National Monument. Being the map nerd that I am, I was intrigued and looked it up and thought at some time in the future, it would be interesting to visit the park. Since that time, Congress has upped the status of the monument and now it's a national park located east of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

As we approached Badlands National Park, we kept seeing advertisements for Wall Drug, which is a major tourist trap just north of the park. Yeah, we stopped there, only to look around, find a tee-shirt of the place, mainly because I like advertising weirdly different stuff I've visited and then headed south out of town into the park. The park is a geologic wonderland of erosion and there were pullouts along the road with many interpretive signs. We ended up stopping at several, including one where there was a herd of young bighorn sheep. The sheep are very hard to see mainly because they blend in so well with the browns of the badlands, which is why there are no photos of them here.

At another turnout, we stopped and took a walking tour of an interpretive loop trail while we gathered answers for an earth cache based upon fossils. The area is rich in fossil life and we weren't disappointed, getting to see several different varieties of fossils in the rock layers. What was also outstanding about the day was the weather. As you can see from the photos, we ended up driving through the beginnings of a large series of thunderstorms as we made our way across southern South Dakota that day. The first storm started while we were on our way out of the visitors center at the east end of the park heading back to the Interstate (third photo). The clouds made for some gorgeous photo opportunities. And, as always, I could have spent more time there, but we had an itinerary to keep to and were actually attending a geocaching event in South Dakota later that evening (who goes to a geocaching event several thousand miles from home?).

I'm sure I'll get back to the area in the future and the plan will be to camp a couple of nights there to fully enjoy the park. We got an appetizer of the park that day, be enough that made us both want to come back.

On our way back out to the Interstate, we got pelted with rain, as we had earlier the day before coming from Wind Cave National Park. This time, the storm got a little bit more severe as we drove across the South Dakota prairie. We had the radio on and we kept getting the weather alerts, those alerts that we rarely get in Southern California because we don't get any kind of severe weather, but scares the bejesus out you when they come on. These were coming every fifteen minutes detailing thunderstorms and worse, hail storms, with hail the size of ping pong balls.  Later, the size of the hail stones were "upgraded" to golfball size hail. Fortunately, they also listed counties where this was likely to happen and my youngest was tracking it using the atlas and checking out where the counties were and all of the major alerts were south of the Interstate, so we missed the hail, but did get an entertaining thunder and lightning storm accompanied by very heavy rain. Fortunately, the geocaching event was under a covered shelter in a park, so we stayed high and dry for the entire event except when we were walking to and from our car. 

I've attended five geocaching events out of state and every one has been very enjoyable. We share a common hobby and it's always fun to swap stories with the local geocachers. We'd had problems with a cache near our motel and I mentioned it to one of the cachers there and he pointed me to another cacher who was the owner. The owner of the cache met up with us back at his cache after the event and we discovered that the cache was indeed missing, so he replaced it with another one he'd had in his car. He had been intending on giving it to us, but instead, gave us a couple others that he had made using his 3D printer. And so I have a cache container that looks like an oak acorn and another one that looks like a pine cone. They are my souvenirs from South Dakota geocaching.

The next day we left South Dakota behind and headed into Minnesota and Iowa, spending the next night in northern Iowa in Mason City.