I’d gotten up early to view the sunrise over the buttes and then sat down at our campsite’s picnic table to catch up on blog writing. After almost an hour of work I heard, “Dad, I’m ready to get out of the tent now.” I told Adler that it was only 5:45 am and asked if he’d like to get more rest. Then he asked, “Why did you put the rain fly on the tent?” The fly had been purposely left off the night before for optimal stargazing. I answered that it was on to prevent the sun from waking him up. “Do you know what? The sun did wake me up.” Life with a six-year-old.
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| One of the Badlands vista |
His desire to get up early ended up helping us out. We ate breakfast and packed up earlier than any previous day. Badlands opens at 7 am and we were on the road by 7:30. Badlands is a lot like Bryce Canyon in that you can drive most of it in a day. The map says that the loop drive can be completed in one hour. It took us a little more than 90 minutes to meander through the park making stops along the way to marvel at the beauty, snap photos, and look for wildlife. I did see one giant bison down in a valley about one third to one half of a mile away. Adler was unable to see it and because it was so far away there was no point in taking a picture. Binoculars were how I enjoyed that animal. The most amazing wildlife that we happened upon were a group of bighorn sheep feeding on grass near the rim of a valley. There were young lambs interspersed between the elders with amazing curved horns. As we drove through Badlands I couldn’t help but think that THIS was the example of America the Beautiful with amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesties. While not a literal manifestation of the song’s lyrics it was darn close.
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| Bighorn sheep ready to descend |
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| A snake for Adler |
There are signs everywhere warning of rattlesnakes and Adler was intent on seeing on. We were not so lucky (depending on your perspective) but I did find this long guy slithering across the road and showed him to Adler as he made his way into the grass. Though not venomous and without a rattling tail it was good enough.
We then made the short drive to Wall South Dakota to see the infamous Wall Drug. Along highway 90 for hundreds of miles there are billboards advertising this tourist location. They still have 5 cent coffee! I don’t know how best to describe it other than “Meh!”. Could we have skipped it? Absolutely. Would we have been left wondering what we’d missed? Sure. In the end it wasn’t too far out of our drive and Adler got to take a few pictures including one atop a giant jackalope.
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| Jackalope riding at Wall Drug |
South Dakota is one of the states that houses are missile defense system. It is on display in the wide open. If I thought that visiting the National Civil Rights Museum would be a little over Adler’s head than this was on par with that (if not even more difficult for him to comprehend). Both locations are sobering and reflective. Staring down into the tube and seeing a warhead atop a rocket knowing that this has the potential to wipe out hundreds of thousand of people alone is not a thought taken lightly. Moreover, this would be just one rocket fired out of hundreds if not thousands that would spell the end of humanity. Someday I will revisit the importance of this stop with Adler but for now I have photos and my own haunting memories.
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| Looking through Doane Robinson Tunnel |
This was the day that we packed the most sites and stops into a single drive. They were all relatively close in distance with no more than two hours between. Entertaining Ranger Rick from last night’s bat presentation advised anyone driving to Mt. Rushmore to take the little known Keystone road instead of the direct highway. This ended up adding almost an hour to the drive but it was worth it. What Rick had briefly described was a series of tunnels and views of the president’s faces along the drive. Then he went back to talking about bats. His quick summation doesn’t do the Keystone drive justice. The first tunnel that we came upon had cars and a bus parked on the side of road. People were walking through the tunnel carved in rock that is only wide enough for one car to pass at a time. We parked like the other tourists and then walked to the mouth of the tunnel. Through the darkness you could clearly see sunlight on the other side and a perfectly framed view of Mt. Rushmore! In total there were three such tunnels and each one was impressive. If you take the normal drive to Mt. Rushmore you don't get to the the presidents until you’ve parked your car and walked up to the viewing area. We had 45 minutes of spectacular vistas before even getting to the real park.
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| Made it to Mt. Rushmore! |
When we arrived at Mt. Rushmore I found out that our
annual pass didn’t afford us entry. We still had to pay the $10 per car fee. No worries. The parking pass is good for the rest of the year so if I happen to rent the same SUV (they tag it to the license plate) then I can drive back to South Dakota as many times as I want through 2018 and save the $10 fee again. I had concerns that the president’s faces would look be small in real life similar to the Statue of Liberty which appears so grand on television only to find out that she’s rather short. They are not. The scale and size of the faces carved into rock is impressively large. We took some photos from the viewing area and then Adler was feeling rather adventurous so we hiked up to see them up close. He was a great sport.
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| Being a boy and loving it! |
Our final destination of the day was to Devil’s Tower--America’s first national monument. This would take us into Wyoming where we’d spend the next four days. The image of Richard Dreyfuss’s
mashed potato sculpture from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is forever burned into my memory. The actual monolith is visible from more than 45 miles away during the drive. As we got closer it became more and more exciting. Adler told me that I’d lied to him and that animals had not “carved the sides with their claws.” When we arrived it was also hot and we’d exceeded the limits of Adler’s viewing patience in one day so we made a deal to hike up to the base and take a couple of photos before leaving. Upon starting our hike I was transported back to California with the smells of dry pine needles with warm dusty earth--aromas that I associate with the parched forests of California. Even though we’d made a pact to appease his interests he didn’t want to leave because taking photos meant scaling granite boulders and this was fun. “Dad, can we take another?” As we’d learned at Horseshoe Point in the Grand Canyon the kid likes climbing rocks.
We still had a one hour drive to the hotel in Gillette. This was strategically planned so that we had a more bearable 6.5 hour drive to Yellowstone the next day. Adler’s talked about the hotel all day because he was anxious to go swimming. Unknown to him was the fact that this hotel didn’t have a swimming pool. Instead it had a WATER PARK complete with a never ending river, water slides, pool basketball and wet fun. I promised him one hour here because it was already 6:30 pm and then we went out to dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant before retiring for the night. Yellowstone here we come…
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