Meandering Magees: The Badlands

If the wind was bad on Monday, it was whipping even worse on Tuesday. Our friends in Oklahoma City said the wind can just wear on you after awhile. We are beginning to understand what they mean. As we headed east to tour the Badlands, the sun was shining and as long as we stayed in the car, it was comfortable – mid 60’s. But we really couldn’t stand outside for long. It’s a good thing we could see the desolate landscape while driving. There really aren’t hiking trails here like other National Parks. There are pullover viewpoints, which we did take advantage of.

And we are not going to complain about the weather. Our sister-in-law Karen told us when her family drove through the Badlands when she was a little girl, her and her sister had their feet in buckets of ice water to stay cool because the heat was so oppressive! We’ll take a little wind over that!

The exit off I-90 for the Badlands is at the town of Wall. You can’t miss it because billboards hundreds of miles out beckon you to visit Wall Drug. The story of Wall Drug should be taught in every marketing/business class in the country. Dorothy and Ted Hustead purchased a drug store in the little town of Wall in 1931. The original store was 24 x 80. After a few lean years, Dorothy came up with the idea of offering free ice water to travelers, and advertising such on signs along the road. The rest, as they say, is history. The drug store and the town of Wall all prospered from Dorothy’s “marketing genius”. Today’s Wall Drug includes the original soda fountain, along with a restaurant. It is obvious they kept buying the properties next to them because you just keep walking through more doorways into more souvenirs, clothing and sundry items. The Husteads developed the back of the property into an outdoor courtyard that leads to more shops where you can pan for gold and browse geological items. The entire town has benefitted as the main street is filled with touristy shops. I saw pictures on the wall that showed how many miles to Wall Drug signs around the country and Europe!

The entrance to the Badlands is straight south of Wall. Both the Indian and French words for this area mean “bad land”. Here is a quote from the info guide, “ Fancy yourself on the hottest day in summer in the hottest spot of such a place without water-without an animal and scarce an insect astir-without a single flower to speak pleasant things to you and you will have some idea of the utter loneliness of the Bad Lands.”

The area isn’t totally devoid of life. We saw another prairie dog town, and Mike spotted something high on a cliff. We pulled over, got out the binoculars and saw mountain goats. The one thing we didn’t see at Yellowstone, so we were excited! Buffalo and cattle also graze on the prairie.

Initially, the Badlands resembled the terrain we saw at the Painted Desert in Arizona. The colors are just more muted. I thought of Bryce Canyon when looking over the landscape. But Bryce Canyon’s rocks formations are a reddish-orange color. These rock formations are light tan or the color of beach sand. In fact, we thought many of the rocks looked like sand castles made by kids at the shore. Just as you can spend hours looking at clouds and imagining different shapes, you could do the same with the Badlands. We were told the colors can look different at dawn and dusk, but we were there right in the middle of the day. Intermingled in the rocks are green grassy areas. With the wind, we didn’t spend much time out on the available benches to just sit and admire the view and embrace the quiet.

We stopped in Rapid City for a late lunch/early dinner. The downtown area offered many choices and was easily walkable with no problem finding parking spots. A unique feature here was life-size sculptures of the 42 Presidents on each street corner. So at each intersection, there were 4. As we approached each statue, we tried to guess who it was. Some were easy – Truman was holding a newspaper (from the famous photo of the newspaper headline “Dewey Beats Truman”. John Kennedy was holding hands with John, Jr. Reagan was wearing a cowboy hat. We didn’t see all 42, but the concept, building on nearby Mt. Rushmore (tomorrow’s destination) is a great way to get visitors to walk around downtown.

I’ll close with another quote, this one about Devil’s Tower from yesterday: “At the top of the ridge I caught sight of Devil’s Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if, in the birth of time, the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil’s Tower is one of them.”