Wall Drug and the Badlands

Pactola Lake

On Saturday, September 8th, we packed up and left Pactola Lake. As we drove past the lake, we caught sight of the small island we'd seen a few times. An American flag flew in the breeze on top of it as a little boat motored past. How pretty.

We drove east through Rapid City and out I-90 to Wall Drug. With hundreds of billboards advertising Wall Drug along our path, we succumbed to the pressure and stopped at the store to check it out. Wall Drug is located in the town of Wall, South Dakota, right off the highway. The store itself began as a drug store, bought by Ted and Dorothy Hustead in 1931. After 5 years of lackluster sales, Dorothy came up with the idea of advertising free ice water to the passing travelers and business rapidly improved.

Today's billboards still offer free ice water and 5-cent coffee, but also a free donut and coffee to veterans (or honeymooners). Entering through one of the many front doors we found a maze of hallways connected to rooms offering everything from laxatives and aspirin to tourist tchotchkes of every ilk to fine jewelry and Native American art. Wall Drug is a combination store, with a bakery, a diner, several shops, an outdoor playground, another restaurant, a museum, a chapel and yet more stores. Ken collected his free coffee and plain donut, and I ordered a coffee and a maple donut. We nibbled our excellent cake donuts, obviously freshly made with the dough still a little crispy. So tasty. And the coffee was worth far more than 5 cents.

Yellow Mounds Overlook

After our little snack, we headed south straight into the Badlands National Park. A park loop road took us past most of the interesting features of the park, though, sadly, we missed the herd of buffaloes because they were down a bumpy gravel road we didn't take. In any case, the Badlands, we learned, were formed by the erosion from the Black Hills to the west. As the sediment in the Black Hills flowed downstream along several rivers, the Badlands area filled in layer by layer. Eventually, the layers turned to siltstone and mudstone with other layers of volcanic ash from formerly active volcanoes to the park's northeast.

View of Eagle Nest Butte in center of horizon

As we made our way around the loop road, we stopped at the scenic overlooks and took in the sweeping view to the horizon and Eagle Nest Butte off in the far distance. We read that the haze from air pollution in distant states sometimes clouds the view of the butte, but we were fortunate to actually see it.

We continued on to a short path around some old fossils, replicas of the many fossils deposited here over the area's 75 million years of history. The boardwalk kept us safely above any possible rattlesnakes, but certainly not out of the glaring sunshine. Even at only 85 degrees or so, the sun was unrelenting and felt much warmer. We found another turnout offering several short hikes to various points overlooking the Badlands. We hiked along the Window Trail, a path to yet another view of the surrounding layers of sediment worn down into jagged peaks and deep valleys.

So many prairie dogs!

Before heading out of the park, we stopped in at the visitor center to watch the park video. We learned of the many animals who call the Badlands their home, including hundreds of animals we didn't see in the bright sunshine of the day. Foxes, bison, bighorn sheep and the endangered black-footed ferrets are some of the animals protected within the park's boundaries but many are nocturnal. The silly prairie dogs were everywhere and we enjoyed watching literally thousands of them running around on the sides of the road. Ha!

Just outside the east entrance of the Badlands is the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. Housed in two temporary trailers oddly, we stopped in to watch the informational video on the site's importance to the Cold War. We learned that in the 1950s hundreds of Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles were housed in underground silos scattered around western and central South Dakota. The Cold War prompted the US to find a way to defend the country with missiles that the Soviets could not shoot down before they landed on their intended targets. Thousands of miles inland and safely out of the reach of the Soviet Navy, the missiles could be launched within 5 minutes after deployment, with only a 30 minute travel time to points within the Soviet Union. Though the Minuteman I missiles, and subsequently the Minuteman II missiles, were deactivated following the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, more than 500 nuclear missiles are still on alert in the upper Great Plains.

We tried unsuccessfully to attend a guided tour of the Delta-09 Launch Control Facility, thwarted by our inability to park the coach in the tiny parking lot. We ended up a gravel road barely wide enough for just the RV and no way of easily turning around. In a small intersection between two cattle ranches just beyond the launch control facility, we had to completely unhook the car and tow dolly before turning the RV around and reconnecting everything. By then, the tour was half over. We were both disappointed.

In any case, we continued east on I-90 until we reached the small town of Chamberlain where we stopped for the night at Oasis Campground, a lovely park with a very friendly owner who suggested the Al's Oasis Restaurant across the street for dinner. We walked to Al's and enjoyed a great dinner before returning to the park to catch up on laundry and some Downton Abbey episodes. What an interesting day!