Days Afield: Day 381 - Good days in the Badlands

Legs 2 & 3: 1235 miles from Chicago to Interior, SD
via Strawberry Point, IA, and Mitchell, SD
(2,052 miles, so far)

So the stated reason for this trip is to cross off my list the last three states in the Lower 48 that I haven’t yet been to.

Yesterday: South Dakota… check.

It’s hard to say this credibly, but what song do you suppose was playing on the radio as I crossed over from Minnesota to South Dakota? By Springsteen? (Wait for it….) Badlands. Yes, I’m serious. Pretty neat, actually.

Despite my intention, I’m getting to take this trip mostly out of circumstance and kindness. I’m actually delivering the car I’m driving to friends in New Orleans. They were in NYC for the summer and are returning directly to New Orleans after doing some other traveling; I got to take the car back for them—by way of South Dakota. Well, I didn’t exactly ask about South Dakota in particular. Uhh…

Point is, I had the car at the end of August. And I had these three states to get through. It wasn’t like I got to plan the trip to these places at ideal times. I actually didn’t know when the ideal time to be in the Badlands is, but it’s apparently not usually at the end of August when the temperatures are typically 100-105 during the day, around 80 at night, and the height of the dry season assures you that all the prairie grasses are brown and dormant.

Except this wasn’t like any usual year. Temperatures had been running 15-20 degrees below normal and they received about one-third more rain than they normally do. My dumb luck and good fortune. Grasses were green and lush and made for some spectacular early morning hikes on top of the highly eroded buttes. Just as the sun was cresting their jagged tops, I crossed paths at some distance with breakfasting antelope, stepped over cacti, craned my head to follow darting swallows and swooping finches, and even heard a rattlesnake. The snake’s rattle was less what I was expecting from theatrical representations, but when you hear it in the tall grasses a few feet off to your side, you know exactly what it is and it freezes you in your tracks.

And then the bugs start biting, so you keep pressing on.


I got a quick primer in the heavens, too. I joined Ranger Larry and some fellow campers for an evening astronomy program at the Badlands Amphitheater. Apparently southwestern South Dakota, along with parts of Utah, are considered some of the darkest parts of the continental United States, ideal for stargazing. Except this was also the time of a full moon. So any gazing we did was confined to the first 45 minutes or so of darkness.

A group of about 30 of us had been gathered around Rangers Larry as they used these nifty high-powered laser pointers to show us Antares, how to find Polaris from the ladle of the big dipper, and (this was most exciting to me) how to pick out orbiting military and meteorological satellites as they glided by dozens of miles overhead. There were even a few shooting stars!

“Nah, probably just space junk coming home,” Ranger Larry said, tamping down enthusiasm.

There was even some shooting space junk!

Then the eastern sky began to brighten over the buttes’ edges and, a few minutes later, the sky was set ashine by a moon so bright that I had to wince to look at it.

We gave our eyes a moment to adjust. Some of the kids were already staring at the moon’s surface through binoculars. Ranger Larry explained how the tidal relationship between the Earth and moon has slowed its rotation so that we always see the same side of the moon from Earth.

“That’s the same side of the moon that Jesus saw,” Larry pointed out, to punctuate the point.

In our hour or so of discussion of the heavens, this was the first time any hint of the actual or imagined place Heaven crept in. And while it struck me as a bit tinny to the ear. I’ve sequestered myself with a relatively agnostic crowd in my life such that more-than-casual references to a god sound strange to me. But as I’d discover elsewhere on this trip, God is an ever-present force in most other folks' lives.

In the three days I spent in and around the Badlands, I wandered afield to visit the Firehouse Brewing Company in Rapid City, SD, which also led me to an obligatory visit to Mt. Rushmore--one of the more successful bald-faced boosterism projects ever executed. It was conceived by local historian (and, no doubt, property owner) Doane Robinson in the early 1920s as a way to attract tourists to the Black Hills at a time of almost uncontainable westward expansion and hubris. [Read: “Let’s swipe this sacred land from the Lakota, chisel some white guys’ faces into the side of the mountain, and bring more white folks here to gawk at them while we fleece them, too, for their Lincolns and Washingtons in exchange for commemorative spoons and presidential snow globes.”]

By last year, Doane’s vision had succeeded for the small town of Keystone, SD (population 311) to the tune of about 2,000,000 folks a year. (The number of spoons and snow globes was not available.) I am now one of them. And the damn concessionaire that runs the parking racket for the NPS also has $10 of my money that I’ll never get back.

One of the most interesting side trips was to see the old launch facility for Minuteman ICBM missiles, lately a National Historic Site complete with War Games myth debunking. More on that later.