We woke up to the sun shining brightly and a beautiful and quite filling breakfast. Our delightful hosts ate with us and gave us great insight to the area. Lyndy's family has owned the Triangle Ranch for over 100 years and they have been innkeepers for over 20, making them excellent resources for where to go and what to see in this part of South Dakota. Their home is a beautiful Sears kit home built in 1923 by Lyndy's grandparents.
Armed with maps and advice we headed down the driveway, through the picturesque gate, over the dirt road along the fields past the neighbors and 8 miles later we get to the service road which takes us to the main road. There is no quick trip to Wegmans for Lyndy and Kenny! The nearest store is close to 30 miles away. But it is a beautiful country.
Fair warning is given to watch for obstacles along the driveway....
I have been struck by the colors we have been seeing in the fields and pastures we are driving by. They start with deep dark greens, fir and evergreen almost black greens, then mix with lighter brighter shades of grass greens, silver sage greens, and that crayola staple yellow green or perhaps it's green yellow. No matter, it is beautiful regardless. The yellows turn to golds and the golds to copper and rust. All this is punctuated with patches of white and purple and lavender. It is clear where "amber waves of grain" and "ribbon of highway" come from. (Perhaps I was paying too much attention to the protesters in Madison.) Pictures just don't do justice to the rugged beauty of this area. We were told that this year has been especially wet and thus more green than usual. It's normally much more brown and yellow.
First up on our to do list was Badlands National Park. It is amazing, beautiful, otherworldly. The rock formation alternate between "silly sand" like structures (I am dating myself, do they still sell silly sand?) to sharp pyramidal and everything in between. I don't believe I have the words to describe the Badlands. Just look for yourself...
After we thoroughly explored "the wall" (what you see above), we headed into the park in search of wildlife. We were sort of successful. We saw prairie dogs, lots of them and a mountain goat but our bison sighting was just a bit disappointing. Our only bison sighting is shown below.
As we departed the park we had one last glimpse of prairie dog, the rare giantus cementus variety. He's probably about 10 feet tall.
After the Badlands, we went to the Minuteman Missile National Park. As you may recall if you are of a certain age, we used to be engaged in a "cold war". Well the front lines of the cold war took place here in the midwest. President Bush the first and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the goal of which was to reduce the world's nuclear arsenal. So we decommissioned and deactivated our Minuteman I missile stockpile and launch facilities. Each single Minuteman missile had an explosive capacity equal to 60% of the entire amount of bombs dropped during WWII. And there were 150 such missiles just in South Dakota. The National Park Service took over one of the sites and if you are driving through western South Dakota you can visit the actual control room from which a nuclear war could have been launched. We were frequently reminded on our tour that these guys were on active duty in a war zone. They were allowed some extracurricular activities, including painting the underground sites.
We're having trouble with captions on our pictures so I just want to highlight a few things shown here. The picture just above shows the panel from the control room including a lighted slot labeled "missile away" that was, fortunately, never illuminated. And, I want to make sure you can read the Domino pizza box-esque decoration - the bottom part says "or the next one is free". Gallows humor of the most extreme sort.
So, mostly this post has shared the wonderful, let me include a bit of the weird that we have seen in the Badlands. This roadside art for example, a giant antelope created from rusted junk metal. Note in the second picture, that it is actually standing on a pedestal of a crushed old car.
And from a town named Scenic, we give you the most scenic building.
A&L
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