Urban Dictionary Bad

The Trip – Day 20

Rapid City, South Dakota – Murdo, South Dakota

Badlands National Park

155 miles 

When the first settlers saw the dry terrain of western South Dakota, they may or may not have appreciated the scenic beauty of its miles of sedimentary rocks, formed from sand, silt and clay and heavily eroded by eons of wind and water. Then, those who traveled through the area, and those brave enough to attempt to live there, would soon come to refer to that area as the “badlands”, “bad” in the classic Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of the word - “unfavorable, disagreeable, unpleasant”. Those coming to see the area today, now Badlands National Park, would be more likely to use the the Urban Dictionary definition of the word “bad” - “dope, good, tight”. (Translation for the unhip: “cool, neat”...)

Sun-clouds-shadow-wind God-art

We left Rapid City early on Day 20 to arrive at the Badlands early to beat the heat and the possible afternoon storms. (We beat the storms, but not the heat...) The park has almost 40 miles of road with scenic overlooks and short trails amid the rock formations and extensive prairie. There were dirt roads we opted out of, roads that would have led us to free-roaming bison and an extensive prairie dog town, but we drove 25 miles of the main paved road section, stopping at every overlook and hiking some of the shorter trails. Like so much of the rock formations in the west, the Badlands formations kept changing in color, size, and vantage point. The day was sunny, but there were big puffy cumulus clouds blowing across the sky, casting moving shadows on the landscape, making for some pretty impressive God-art. While the Grand Tetons was my favorite park on the trip, the Badlands would be my husband's favorite park. He described it as a smaller Grand Canyon, one you could easily walk into, sometimes from the bottom, looking up at the eroded rocks formations, sometimes from above, looking down into its small canyons, sometimes walking through or on the formations themselves. Despite the erosion potential of the sandstone structures, climbing them seemed to be

"Great to get out of that car!"

the thing to do, especially if one was between the ages of eight and eighteen. There were large sections of the park that had relatively safe climbing potential for kids, and climb they did. My husband said it appeared that travel-weary families, the parents, likely confined to cars for hundreds of miles with their kids, had found this perfect place to let their kids out to blow off all that pent-up energy in surroundings where they weren't likely to do too much damage to themselves. To those kids, and probably their road-tired parents, these lands were “bad” as in “great”...

The day did get hot, too hot for me to do all the hiking I would have liked to have done, though it didn't stop my husband and his camera. Fortunately, there was a great visitor center to cool off in. In addition to the usual geological displays and orientation films, this one had a paleontology lab, also known as the Fossil Preparation Lab, a place one could see some of the important fossils found in the Badlands and watch and talk to some very friendly working paleontologists. Visitors to the Badlands are highly encouraged to find fossils in the surrounding fossil-rich area, instructed to not touch their finds, but to get GPS readings on the location or, for the less technological, carefully articulated hand drawn maps, and report the find to a ranger or one of the paleontologists in the lab. Significant and rare fossils have been found by kids as young as seven (possibly blowing off steam climbing the formations after hours in the car...). While in the lab, I noticed a board with photos of kids and adults, paired with accompanying cards documenting the fossils they had found. There were about forty photos, and the ranger explaining the fossil-finding process said those were people who had found fossils at the Badlands in the past month alone! He told about a college student who had been so excited with her recent visit to the fossil lab and the information she received about the scientific discoveries made in that area that she said, “I'm going out today and find a fossil!” She did. How bad is that?

We didn't find any fossils ourselves, though we really didn't look very hard. We left the cool of the visitor center and did a little more hiking before parting company, my husband to check out a trail with warnings such as “Watch for drop-offs. Not recommended for anyone with a fear of heights. Treacherous during or after heavy rains”, me to the car to find some shade and pull the ice packs out of the cooler and put them down my shirt. The heat was bad, in the Merriam-Webster definition of the word, but the rest of the Badlands was dope and tight, definitely Urban Dictionary “bad”...

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt – John Muir

Next:

Winding Down

The Trip – Day 21

Murdo, South Dakota – Fairmont, Minnesota

Missouri River Sioux Falls

322 miles

On the Presidential Trail

The Trip – Day 19 Part II

Gillette, Wyoming – Rapid City, South Dakota

Devils Tower, Mt. Rushmore

170 miles

When we left Devils Tower in the early afternoon, the valley between the tower and the interstate was still hazy with smoke from the wildfires the night before. As we traveled on I 90 toward the Wyoming border, we saw thick smoke on a mountain near the state line. We stopped at the South Dakota Welcome Center just in time to see a helicopter, dangling a large sack, fly to a pond behind the rest area, dip the sack into the water, and head toward the smoking mountain. Other helicopters arrived, doing the same. Though about five miles in the distance, the orange glow of the flames was visible through binoculars. Fortunately, the fire, though extensive, was in a unpopulated area of the Black Hills, and no homes were in danger.

Forest fire off the interstate on the Wyoming/South Dakota border

Helicopter bringing water to the fire

Close up of fire, orange glow on the right and top

We exited the interstate, drove through Rapid City, South Dakota, past our hotel for the night, to our destination for the afternoon, Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. Though administered by the National Park Service, Mt. Rushmore and its carved granite likenesses of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln is not a national park, nor a national monument but a national memorial. I'm not sure of the nuances of the distinctions, but it was the first time my senior pass was met with the words “That will be eleven dollars, please...” The senior pass had so far given us free admission to six national parks and one national monument on this trip, so I asked if I had gone to the wrong entrance. No, I was told, but the parking for the memorial was outsourced to a private company, so I was paying for the privilege of parking in a multi-sectioned, multi-level parking garage, obviously needed to bring order and sanity to this very popular tourist spot. 

Surrounding area, showing type of granite that the faces were carved from

The Boys

Avenue of Flags

Plaster models in sculptor's studio

Detail of Lincoln's eye

The Mt. Rushmore Memorial is small by national park standards, but very developed with an ornately-paved Avenue of Flags, an amphitheater, a viewing terrace, a museum, a cafe and ice cream shop, a large visitor center and a sculptor's studio. There was also a Presidential Trail, a well-maintained half mile staircase that passes below the presidential sculptures. After almost non-stop sun for the previous 18 days, the weather threatened most of our time at Mt. Rushmore. Thick dark clouds overhead and constant rumbles of thunder made one of us very nervous about “hiking” the metal-railed, tree-lined, higher-than-anything-else-around Presidential Trail. (This was not the one who was afraid of getting his feet sandy...) We waited out the threatening weather in the sculptor's studio, containing large plaster models of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum's original vision. We also spent some time at another inside exhibit showing how the faces were “carved” with precisely positioned dynamite charges. The thunder faded off in the distance, as did the darkest of the clouds, and the few sprinkles of rain stopped, so we ventured on the trail and got a closer look at the famous carvings. It was impressive to see close up how accurately one can sculpt with explosives, and then how the sculptor worked the finer details, choosing to form Roosevelt's eyeglasses and the other presidents' eyes with simple shapes that give the illusion of eyeglasses and pupils from a distance.

Detail of Roosevelt's eyeglasses

With the sky still black, we headed back to Rapid City to check into our hotel and find a place to eat. There were severe storms nearby, but we managed to avoid them. Late afternoon storms are common in the Rapid City area in the summer, and were predicted for the following day as well. To avoid the worst of the storms, we planned on an early night and an early trip to the nearby Badlands the next day.

The sky was like this all afternoon.

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. – Henry Miller




Next:
  

Urban Dictionary Bad...

The Trip – Day 20

Rapid City, South Dakota – Murdo, South Dakota

Badlands

155 miles

Close Encounters of the Monumental Kind

The Trip – Day 18

Dubois, Wyoming – Gillette, Wyoming

393 miles

and

The Trip – Day 19 Part 1

Gillette, Wyoming – Rapid City, South Dakota

Devils Tower, Mt. Rushmore

170 miles 

The day after the Grand Tetons' park trip we traveled from Dubois, through Casper, to Gillette, a gradual downhill drive from the Rockies toward the high plains with the accompanying scenery changing along the way. Wyoming is the least populated state in the country, having less than 600,000 people in an area of over 97,000 square miles. Much of the part we traveled through on Day 18 was Indian reservation or open ranch land, dotted with cattle and antelope. I loved the wide open, hilly feel of the state, and even the ever-present gun shops and constant Second Amendment chatter on talk radio did little to detract from, and probably added to, Wyoming's western beauty.

Driving through Wyoming

In the initial planning of the trip we were to travel this day from Dubois, Wyoming, to Rapid City, South Dakota, where we would spend the night before visiting the Badlands. This would be a 500+ mile day, breaking the 300 mile per day average rule by quite a bit. When I regained my sanity, I booked a hotel for Gillette, Wyoming, still giving us a 300+ mile day, but also allowing a low mileage day after that as well as some flex time for a surprise adventure. My husband had seen a brochure for Devils Tower National Monument sometime during our Wyoming travels and asked if we were passing anywhere near it. I didn't know – it hadn't even been on our long list of parks to visit (though it is technically a national monument and not a park). I looked up the location of Devils Tower and found it to be a short detour off Interstate 90 between Gillette and Rapid City. We decided to leave Gillette early the following morning and make Devils Tower our surprise adventure for the first part of the day, though I suspected I would be dealing with a movie-obsessed husband for much of it. One of my husband's quirks is that he has

Could have been dinner the night before...

the ability to fully enter (Forever!) into the world of any movie that strikes his fancy. (Just ask the kids whom he delights with his dead-on imitation of Darth Vader, kids whose parents weren't even born when my husband first saw Star Wars...) Devils Tower played a prominent role in the plot of the 1977 Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The night before we were to go to Devils Tower, my husband asked if we could go to a restaurant that served mashed potatoes – lots of 'em – wanting to reenact a scene from the movie. We didn't. He didn't...

Smokey valley or potential alien landing field?

Native American depiction of the tower's formation

There had been wildfires a short distance from Devils Tower* the day before, closing the interstate during the night. I checked the fire status the morning of Day 19 and found the fire mostly contained, so we found ourselves on a somewhat smokey road off the interstate on our way to the tower. The 800+ foot butte could be seen from the distance as we approached. The unique striped and cracked shape of the tower is believed to be the remains of an ancient volcano, the earthen outside of the volcano long ago eroded, leaving only the hardened lava interior. The native American explanation for the vertical crevassed sides involves the climbing of the tower by a huge bear, the stripes around the tower left by its sharp claws. The “park” itself is relatively small, consisting of two concentric main trails, a 1.3 mile one around the base of the tower and a 3+ mile one that could be made longer with some side trails. We had only planned to be here for the morning, so we took the shorter trail around the base, I to get closer views of the tower, my husband to locate the route Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) and Jillian (Melinda Dillon) took in search of aliens. The trail was easy and pleasant, mostly level, mostly paved, and mostly treed. The outside views were of the surrounding valley, slightly hazy with smoke today, and the inside view was of the rocky base of the tower rising to its stripey vertical heights. My husband didn't know where to look first. Was that valley view where the landing pad for the Close Encounters space ship was located? That particular pile of rocks at the base surely must be where Roy and Jillian climbed up to escape the helicopters. Or maybe it was those rocks over there... I could tell it was going to be a long morning.

"Roy and Jillian were here!"

It was a beautiful morning, though. Each side of the tower is different, changing shape as one hikes around it. Being early in the day, the sun would backlight the tower on one side, illuminate it on another. There were deer and prairie dogs and other wildlife in the area including one large extremely photogenic snake. A fellow hiker put his GoPro on the ground a few feet from the snake, and the snake slithered right up to it and passed slowly in front of it like he had been in similar photo ops many times before. We heard voices in the air and looked up to see climbers on the tower, and though far away, the walls of the tower amplified their voices. We took shots of them with the paparazzi zoom and found seven climbers on that section of the tower. 

A very photogenic snake

Three of the climbers

Devils Tower is a popular place for rock climbers. In 1893, a local rancher was the first to climb the tower, constructing a 350 foot ladder of wood, anchored into one of the vertical cracks of the tower. It was used by others for subsequent climbs, and parts of it are still visible today, still wedged into the crevasse. The tower is also a sacred place for native Americans, and some consider climbing the tower disrespectful to their sacred site. There is a

Prayer cloths and prayer bundles

voluntary ban on climbing during the month of June, a time of special traditional tribal ceremonies. Most climbing guides in the area respect this ban, but the climbers we saw the day we were there were either oblivious to the ban or chose to ignore it. There were many tribal prayer bundles and prayer cloths attached to branches of the trees around the base of the tower, with signs along the trail asking to respect their presence and not to touch them. I hope taking photos of them is a way of respecting them...

Remnants of the old ladder (within the larger shaded crevasse to the right)

 

After we completed our trail around the base, after my own personal Roy Neary had obsessed about rocks and aliens and humongous space ships and their possible landing sites, we stopped at the small visitor center where I threatened to embarrass my husband by asking the ranger on duty where the Close Encounters exhibit was. There was none. No mention of the movie at all in the visitor center. We were, however, to find out much later there was a general store outside the park boundary that had a collection of movie memorabilia and DVDs and showed the movie in its entirety every night at 7 pm. Lucky for one of us we didn't know that at the time...

Movie...

Not movie...

* For all the punctuation police out there who have been grinding their teeth, it is, in fact, officially “Devils Tower” and not “Devil's Tower”. When the area was declared a National Monument in 1906, the proclamation inadvertently left out the apostrophe. The National Park Service continues to use “Devils Tower” as the official name.

I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road, I've been seeing this shape. Shaving cream, pillows... Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important. - Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

My husband, the night before the Devils Tower trip...

I guess you've noticed something a little strange with Dad. It's okay, though. I'm still Dad. - Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Too close selfie or alien beings?

Next:

On the Presidential Trail

The Trip – Day 19 Part II

Gillette, Wyoming – Rapid City, South Dakota

Devils Tower, Mt. Rushmore

170 miles

  Grand! Grand! Grand!

Part II

Stories on the Road

The Trip – Day 17

Rexburg, Idaho – Dubois, Wyoming

The Grand Tetons National Park

195 miles 

One of the main purposes in taking this road trip was to see and experience things we hadn't seen and experienced before. As we traveled across the country, we came to realize we were surrounded by people who are also out to see and experience things they have not seen and experienced before. Yes, there are moments and places where one can be alone in a national park, but those moments can be rare, those places few. At the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, the midday crowds could be intense, with a disappointingly large number of people oblivious to the fact they were sharing shuttles and viewing areas and hiking trails with other people. Many visitors to the parks are selfie-obsessed, with cameras and smart phones aggressively competing for the best vantage points to document one's presence at any given place at any given time (says one half of the couple that generated over 4,000 pictures on this trip...). Still, the quickest and easiest way to positively interact with a person is to offer to take their picture or ask them to take yours. Sharing picnic tables, especially shady ones, is another way to enter into other people's lives. Everyone has a story, and we were surrounded by people willing to share theirs at the right moment. During our visit to the Grand Tetons, we had the opportunity to interface with several of those stories.

 * * *

Chapel of the Transfiguration

We were on the grounds of the Chapel of the Transfiguration near the Menor's Ferry village and were about to enter the open chapel when a woman, a little younger than a POACA, approached us. Could we not go into the chapel just yet? Her daughter was inside, and unbeknownst to the daughter, her boyfriend had just run back to the car to get the engagement ring he was about to propose to her with. Could we wait outside just for a short while? The woman explained to us that her daughter had been coming to the park since she was a small child, that the chapel was her favorite place in the park. Her fiance was aware of this and wanted to ask her to marry him in that special place. A few other visitors approached, and the woman asked the same of them, if they would wait a few minutes. We all sort of nonchalantly milled around the grounds, pretending to look at posted historic information about the chapel. The boyfriend returned, entered the chapel, and after a short time, exited with a tearfully happy fiancee. Of course, all of us who had been asked to wait had by this time lined the walkway in front of the chapel and applauded the newly engaged couple. When we finally entered the chapel, and saw what made it so special, it already had new meaning for us, having given us the opportunity to, in a small way, be part of a couple's significant moment.

Interior view, chapel stained glass

Looking out the window, behind the altar of the Chapel of the Transfiguration

   * * *

Summer in the west is travel time for motorcyclists, and the national parks are a popular destination for them. We passed many bikers on the roads around the parks (...actually, they passed us...) and we had the opportunity to eat with some of them at the Grand Tetons. Looking for a place to have our backpack lunch before our afternoon hike, we had been lucky enough to find a recently vacated large shaded picnic table in a busy picnic area. A woman, a fellow POACA, carrying a motorcycle helmet, asked if she and her traveling companions could share our table. Of course, we said. She was soon joined by her husband and another couple, helmets in tow, and we had a pleasant lunch together. They were from Kansas, had trailered their motorcycles to South Dakota, and were now touring the Rockies. They had spent the previous night in Yellowstone and were headed to Colorado. They asked about our trip, and my husband shared pictures of some of our adventures, they, in turn, showing us some of their photos. Having been at Yellowstone soon after someone had disappeared into one of the boiling hot springs, they started talking about all the ways one could meet one's demise in the various national parks. This made for a somewhat morbid, but interesting conversation until we parted company, we to do our lake hike, they to continue their ride toward Colorado. Later in the day, when we stopped on the shore of Jackson Lake to take some pictures, we were approached by another biker, who offered to take a picture of both of us.
Would we then take a picture of him and his son? He proudly pointed to a twenty-something guy on a cell phone. He and his son were doing a midwest father-son motorcycle trip together, both biking from the same area of the midwest we had driven from. He told us his son had left a pregnant wife at home with a toddler, and so spent a lot of time on the phone when he could get a signal. After the phone call ended, the two of them posed for a father and son road trip shot and then we all continued on our way.

Photo taken by midwest motorcyclist.  (Jackson Lake in the background)

  * * *

Mt. Moran

The Grand Tetons were also the site of another Oneonta encounter which segued into a poignant story.  We had pulled into an overlook near Mt. Moran and noticed an older (than us) gentleman wearing an Oneonta State wrestling jacket. I told him I knew where that town was, my husband and I had met there, we had graduated from there. His face lit up and he told us he was himself from Pennsylvania, but his nephew was the wrestling coach at Oneonta, and he loved the area, had spent some time there sharing his own wrestling and coaching experience with his nephew. He was friendly and chatty, telling us he was visiting the park with family, commenting on the beautiful view and the glaciers on the mountains. His demeanor subdued slightly as he told us he had always wanted to climb Mt. Moran, the peak in front of us. He shared with us that his brother, a pilot, had died in a plane crash on that mountain years before, that the plane and the remains of all who died in the crash were still up there. He would have liked to honor his brother by climbing the mountain to the crash site, but knew he was too old to do it now. He said the park service doesn't give out information about the crash site because they don't want people hiking up there and disturbing the wreckage of the plane. At this point in his story, a family member called to him from a car, and he said his goodbyes and left. Google was able to finish the story the man in the Oneonta jacket started.* In November, 1950, a New Tribes Mission plane with 21 people on board crashed into Mt. Moran during a snowstorm. There were three pilots on board, one being the brother of the man we had spoken to that day.  Because of the way the plane was wedged into a crevice on the mountain, there was no attempt to salvage the plane or the victims. There was a memorial service on the mountain several months later at the crash site, and today the park service asks that hikers avoid that area in respect for those who are entombed there.

We're all stories, in the end.― Steven Moffat

* For pictures and more details, read: http://www.aircraftwrecks.com/pages/dc3.htm

Next:

Close Encounters of the Monumental Kind

The Trip – Day 18

Dubois, Wyoming – Gillette, Wyoming

393 miles

and

The Trip – Day 19

Gillette, Wyoming – Rapid City, South Dakota

Devils Tower, Mt. Rushmore

170 miles