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| Okay, does this sound anything better than groady to anyone? |
I thought we had hit the jackpot when we pulled into Marshall, SD to sleep the night before. Trailing us into town were giant billboards for miles and miles, boasting of "The World's Only Corn Palace." Successful in its intention, my mom had been driven into enough curiosity by the time we arrived in town that she had to ask what the scoop was. As it turned out, the attraction was not as mind-numbingly reminiscent of what my mom calls "Anywhere, America." For the past ninety-two years, a building in downtown Marshell had acted as a canvas for local artists who designed a themed mural for the outer walls and spires of the building each year and then went about constructing it out of corn husks and straw and other agricultural roughage. This year's theme was celebrations and having been weaseled into the tourist trap, we went down to the site where we got to see a bit of the old design and the beginning panels of the new as the transition season had just recently begun. The attraction had obviously attracted a lucrative market for novelties of all things corny but the museum that the building housed and obviously the viewing of the outer art was all free. As far as gaudy goes, it had an endearing quality about it.
The worst was still to come. I had forgotten that South Dakota was home to "Wall Drug", a name I knew only to the extent that it was THE thing people asked you about if you say you went through South Dakota. It did not take long for me to be reminded of the name. As we headed from Marshall towards the Badlands - our next stop - the influx of billboards quickly surpassed the level of representation that the Corn Palace had boasted. They advertised everything from 5 cent coffee to a giant T-rex statue and free ice water, which we would later learn gave birth to the whole enterprise. Again, mother was suckered in. "I think I'm going to need to stop in Wall Drug."
It was horrendous. Imagine every vendor in Cedar Point condensed into a one-block radius. Hidden behind a block of drab industrial buildings, the "store" takes up an entire street, lined with Old West style benches and antique plaques exclaiming the title of each commodity in extravagant circus fonts. While Wall Drug could be a town in and of itself, it happened to still have some life existing outside of it in the town of wall and from the looks of it, every teenager that lived in Wall had a job at Wall Drug. In its present state, it was hard to imagine what would possibly convince a person to live there and not go on a homicidal rampage of all the tourists. We managed to arrive around supper time and my mom indulged in a Buffalo burger and homemade ice cream while I scarfed down my foodie pride enough to eat a few bland veggies and scarf a couple of properly grease-grizzled onion rings. During "dinner", I read aloud from the small brochure placed at our table. I have to admit, the story of origin is quite the cute little "feel-good", happy ending sort of deal. In the early 30's, against the advice of all family members, Ted and Dorothy Husted had moved from the bustling area of Sioux Falls where Dorothy was a teacher, to the tiny town of Wall. There, they bought a Drug Store. For the next five years, they inched by meagerly with hardly any business and Ted grew increasingly worried that he had made a horribly detrimental decision in moving the to the boonies. Then on a hot summer July day in 1936, Dorothy had a realization as she listened to the hundreds of chugging Jalopies that were passing their store. She got Ted and their son to makeshift a sign for free ice water and soon thereafter, the store was full of parched travelers.
That was the last they ever struggled and today they still offer that free ice water and continue the marketing tradition of a country-style stretch of billboards that goes on infamously for miles. Their other marketing tactic that they rely on is that they are directly on en-route on the hwy-240 Badlands loop. I found this to be an incredibly ironic pairing and experienced the irony first hand. For we did not separate our experience or even start or end the day at Wall. We sandwiched the retched place right in between vibrant reds and yellows and pure blue sky of the Badlands. |
| I did have to indulge in the 5 cent coffee... |
We had entered in from the Eastern part of the loop mid-afternoon. As I looked at the atlas and tried to figured out how my route could have possibly taken me through there two years ago was when I realized I was actually North of the park in the Little Missouri National Grassland. In my defense, it was quite confusing at the time because they referenced the Badlands in all of the interpretive historical panels. Anyhow, realizing that I had not actually been to the Badlands yet re-invigorated my excitement for the day ahead.
We'd experienced a mix of overcast weather the past few days but today decided to stay perfectly clear for us: perfectly un-perfect for Badland environment. Our feet dragged as we convinced ourselves to continuously get in and out of the car at various look outs and trails, unable to stay away from the formations that curved, humped like soft-looking blankets or spiked abruptly into towering castles or exposed flat Prairie where we encountered a Coyote crossing our path and wandered along the edge of a noise Prairie Dog town. The land was captivating, especially since this variant environment emerges so suddenly from what is otherwise a very underwhelming terrain throughout the rest of the state. The geology of the Badlands fascinates not just laypeople but scientists as well. The geology of the Badlands extends back to the Cretaceous period 75 million years ago and its distinct layers of sediment that form the striped patterns throughout the park show many stages of depositions over time. Up until about 34 Million years ago the Badlands was a subtropical, rainforest-type climate and yet hardly any Marine fossils have been found. However, plenty of mammal evidence from the Oligocene period of drying and cooling have been uncovered and we explored a little boardwalk where they had some preserved examples. Scientists still can't quite figure out why there is such a lack of marine fossils. |
| Can you spot the mom? |
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| Oligocene fossil of a Hyaenodon, thought to be related to the modern Heyena |
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| The yellow in this area is a layer created 65 million years ago when the Rockies and Black Hills shot up. The disruption caused tree roots to shift and brake up the shale and chemicals from decaying plants which give it the yellow color. All of these layers are fossilized through millions of years of pressure. |
And so in the heat and the bright of the day, we breathed in some of the freshest air you can get - on a good day you can see clearly for 30 miles out - and we inched and inched closer to...Wall. That sort of juxtaposition throws me off kilter.
One of the best things about the Badlands is the lightplay and fortunately we left Wall just in time to be arriving back in the park for Sunset. The flat, bold stone we'd experienced in the height of day seemed to grow and transform in the shadows under the complex dusk light. However, also staying true to its name, first dubbed by the Native Americans for the unwieldy extremities in weather, our sky was split between a dramatic sunset and a doubly dramatic array of ominous cloud formations. Mother exclaimed "but the weather said it would be clear" and I paraphrased to her from the very blunt brochure description that people come away a "conflicted experience" of the Badlands, whether they are visiting in the "unbearable heat of summer" and cowering at the sudden "lightning storms" but enjoying the active wildlife and vast array of wildflowers, or visiting in the depths of winter and battling "unforgiving winds" but fascinated by the serene landscape. We had already paid for a campsite so we enjoyed our sunset, tried to set the clouds out of mind, out of site and made our way back to get ready for the evening.
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| We encountered a family traveling from Lansing who were kind enough to take our picture. I'm always surprised by the number of Michiganders I run into out here... |
The chance of rain was 30% and everyone we talked to said that at 50%, you should be expecting a storm but at 30% we could get away scott free. Just before bed, we went to a ranger talk that humored us with tales of all of the park precautions and the abrupt weather changes it can go through saying "if you see lightning, get to shelter NOW."
That night, the winds were relentless. If I wasn't kept awake by the physical shaking and caving of the tent, then it was the desperate howling that would keep forming paranoid visuals in my head of tornado funnels plowing towards us. I hate not being able to see what the sky is doing and I kept popping my head outside of the tent, gaining some relaxation when I saw clear starry skies and going back into a panic when a particularly large, dark cloud would block out everything. In the morning, when we woke to a picturesque sunrise, the whole thing felt completely surreal. We heated some water at the campsite as we packed bright and early and took some time to write before getting on the move again to go from the hot, exposed rock of the Badlands to the underbelly of the earth within Wind Cave National Park...
And now for your viewing pleasure, the many shades of the Badlands:
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