Category: travel

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Not National Parks

Who knew? Mount Rushmore is actually Mount Rushmore National Memorial. And we arrived in the late afternoon, just when the sun was in the wrong spot.

Mount Rushmore

There is a really neat hiking trail that goes down and around in front of Mount Rushmore, and it’s neat to see the different perspectives of these four huge presidents. Do you remember who they are?

Mount Rushmore 2

 

We walked the trail after we had dinner at the cafeteria, with a view of the Presidents. So far, finding places to eat had been a little tricky, but we were expecting that. We weren’t counting on our hotels providing breakfast, so we had cereal, milk, and Pop Tarts. We also had lunch staples of sliced turkey, cheese, bread and apples. But it was nice to have someone else serve us dinner!

The day had been a long one; we had been hiking and exploring the Badlands just that morning, toured Wind Cave in the afternoon, and walked by Mount Rushmore that evening. We skipped the evening festivities at Mount Rushmore and headed into Keystone to find our hotel for the night.

The next morning, we left South Dakota and drove into Wyoming. Our plan was to swing by Devil’s Tower National Monument (also not a park!) before we continued on our way to Yellowstone.

Devil's Tower 1

Ed and I drove to Yellowstone before we had kids, and Ed fell in love with Devil’s Tower the first time we stopped there. Now that he was able to climb around the rocks with Lily and Emmy, he loved it even more! And there is a bonus at Devil’s Tower: another prairie dog town!

Devil's Tower 2
Climbing around with Lily and Emmy
Devil's Tower selfie
Selfie time!
prairie dog
Little prairie dogs

We decided to eat lunch at a little cafe at the base of the tower, and then we had a long drive across Wyoming to Cody, which is a town just outside of the west entrance to Yellowstone. We were getting closer to our final destination!

signature P.S. The four presidents are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

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Leaving the Badlands and Entering Wind Cave National Park

It looked like we had just stepped into a Western movie. All those vast, rugged spaces around us.

Our view from the Badlands Inn, right outside the National Park
Our view from the Badlands Inn, right outside the National Park

To us Northern Illinois flatlanders, there was not a bad view anywhere. I’ve been going through my pictures, trying to decide which ones to show you, and there’s just too many! Even Ed was taking pictures with his phone, and he is usually not a picture taker.

Lily and Emmy are somewhere in this picture, exploring. Can you spot them?
Lily and Emmy are somewhere in this picture, exploring. Can you spot them?

The next stop on our road trip was Wind Cave National Park, also in South Dakota. Instead of going back up to the highway, we decided we wanted to see as much of the Badlands as we could, and that meant traveling for several miles along a gravel road. We didn’t get very far before we stumbled upon our first bison herd. Or perhaps the bison stumbled upon us? They wanted to cross the road, so we let them have the right of way.

Badlands bison 1

Badlands bison 2

After we saw the bison, the badlands had given way to rolling prairie. We were driving through Buffalo Gap National Grassland and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There was no place to stop, and when we did get to a small town, it looked more like a ghost town than a place to stop. Most of the buildings were falling apart and disintegrating out in the middle of nowhere. By the time we reached the White River Visitor Center, we had been driving for quite a while on the gravel road. I accidentally overheard one of the park rangers complaining (while Ed was in the bathroom) that all the tourists wanted to do when they came to the visitor center was use the bathroom. I think he was probably right. We did talk with the ranger about Wind Cave until the phone rang and he excused himself to answer it. I hope we appeased him a little bit. We didn’t stop there just to use the bathroom!

(Okay, we totally did.)

Badlands gravel road

Wind Cave is perhaps one of the most overlooked national parks. It is really close to Mount Rushmore, which everyone has heard about and is extremely popular, and yet Wind Cave doesn’t even come close to getting the same amount of visitors. In fact, we weren’t planning on even going to Wind Cave until Ed saw it on the map and decided we had to stop there. It was definitely worth the visit!

Wind Cave National Park

Wind Cave has one natural entrance, and yet it is a large and intricate cave. There have been estimates that only about 5% of the cave has actually been discovered and explored. One ranger described the cave tunnels as though a bowl of spaghetti had been dumped over under the ground. That’s exactly how the map of the cave looks.

The cave has most of the world’s boxwork formations…yes, that’s right, I wrote world’s. This is not your typical cave!

Wind Cave's boxwork formation
Wind Cave’s boxwork formation

The tour we took was amazing, but as you can imagine, my pictures did not turn out very well. It’s dark down in the cave! During one point of the tour, the ranger turns off all of the lights. All of them. It is really, really dark! I even started to get dizzy, and literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Fortunately, the lights came back on again!

Wind Cave tour

Next time you visit South Dakota, I highly recommend a cave tour!

After our tour, we were off to our next stop. Not a national park, but instead a national memorial. Mount Rushmore!

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