Day 4 - SD Badlands

On our way to the Badlands we stopped at a prairie dog trading post. We each bought a bag of “official” prairie dog food, AKA unsalted peanuts. Well, the fat little rodents were somewhat entertaining, but they had already had so many peanuts that day that they weren’t really interested in approaching us no matter how many times Jon crouched down snapping his fingers and making his best prairie dog imitation. “Damn prairie dogs are harder to train than a woman.”





The temperature was 103°F and it was only 9:00 AM. It’s going to be a sizzler in the Badlands today! Our next stop was just outside the park. It was a homestead from 1909; the original home of Mr. & Mr. Ed Brown. It’s has the last remaining sod house in South Dakota. Chickens, geese, and prairie dogs are the only residents now. Although the chickens and the prairie dogs ignored Jon, the geese wanted a piece of him.



The Badlands were spectacular! Just after we entered the park the landscape was transformed. It went from flat prairie to an unearthly like scenery. This area is composed of volcanic ash and silt. It is continuously changing due to rain and erosion, currently this section of the country only receives about 16” of rain annually. Since Al Gore has been playing with “Global Warming”, it has been estimated that the Badlands will be gone in twenty or thirty years! (Says Jon).







We took several short hikes. The temperature was now at least 106°F. We choose for our last hike a “strenuous” mile and a half trail. The trail wasn’t too bad until we got to a wooden ladder that had us climbing up the face of cliff. After that harrowing experience we were then rewarded with a narrow path that took us right to the along the edge. Jon slipped a bit on some loose gravel and decided this would make a fun game to try to scare his wife. Several more times when I went around a corner in front of him, Jon would have “accidents”. He was quite disappointed when I didn’t come running back or inquire as to his status.

The Badlands are inexpressibly beautiful. We would highly recommend this national park. It was awesome!

Our next stop was Wall, South Dakota. Along the way we literally passed about 100 signs advertising Wall Drug. In 1931, Ted and Dorothy Hustead, bought the only drugstore in Wall. The depression had left the small farming town of 826 people pretty desolate. After 5 years of barely making a living, Dorothy, came up the idea of serving free ice water to the tourists passing by to the new attraction nearby, Mt. Rushmore! They made Burma Shave type signs advertising the free water. Ted returned back to the drug store after installing the signs on the highway and found they already had customers asking for the free ice water. The rest was history. They still give away the free ice water, we each had a cup, and now up to 20,000 people each day stop at Wall Drug.