BAD
We
got up very early Sunday morning.
Despite that, Marsha was up to see us off. We toasted bagels and stopped at Dunkin
Donuts for coffee before hitting the highway.
The drive around Chicago was relatively painless, except for all of the annoying
toll booths. Why do they need a toll
booth every few miles? Wouldn’t one toll
booth at that end be sufficient? Google
Maps routed us through the northwestern suburbs and up into Wisconsin. We caught a 30-second downpour before we made
it out of Illinois. It was mostly sunny
the rest of the day.
Southern
Wisconsin features some nice scenery, particularly around The Dells. Mill Bluff State Natural Area has some neat
sandstone cliffs that are visible from the highway. The crossing of the Mississippi River was
scenic, too. Great River Bluffs State
Park would’ve been an interesting place to stop, but we sailed right by
it. I should really research these
things prior to our trips.
Once
we got into southern Minnesota the drive was pretty boring. We actually went almost 700 miles on I-90
without a single turn. It was a long
haul across Minnesota and South Dakota.
We passed through Sioux Falls late that afternoon and headed into the
desolation of central South Dakota. We
did make one interesting stop, at the Dignity Memorial on a bluff high above
the Missouri River. Although the view of
the river was a bit disappointing, the sculpture at the memorial is
stunning. Read all about it here: http://lampherestudio.com/dignity/
From
there we drove on to Wall, South Dakota, where we managed to avoid the local
drug store. We drove towards Badlands
National Park, but turned left onto a dirt road a mile or so before the
entrance. There was a barbed wire gate
across the road, adorned with a National Forest sign that said to close the
gate behind us. I jumped out and opened
it, and Christy drove through. I closed
the gate behind our car and hopped back in for the short drive out to our
intended campsite below some communication towers.
I’d
heard about this spot from a friend who had taken a cross country road trip a
few months earlier. It’s a scenic spot
at the top of cliffs overlooking a vast expanse of the badlands. The campsites don’t have any amenities, but
they are free. However, this place is
definitely not a secret. There were at a
couple of dozen RVs scattered throughout the meadows along the dirt road to the
towers. We even saw one tent. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the
crowd was mainly due to the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South
Dakota. Sturgis is just down the
highway, and we had accidentally timed our visit to coincide with it. The good news was that we would be back in
the Badlands at the end of our trip, after the rally had ended.
We
squeezed into a spot that wasn’t immediately next to an RV and set up
camp. This was tricky, as the wind
threatened to blow our tent right off the cliff. It was a two-person job, but we managed. We were still setting up when we had the
first wildlife encounter of the trip. A
herd of female bighorn sheep walked right by our campsite. They were wild, though a few of them were
wearing tracking collars. They were
heading from the meadows on top of the plateau down into the valley below. It was fascinating watching them descend the
steep, scree-covered hillside below us.
Christy
made a simple dinner on our camp stove.
We weren’t in a good spot for sunset, but clouds on the western horizon
killed that anyway. In fact, the weather
radar showed a line of thunderstorms approaching us from the west. Incredibly, the storm split, with the bulk of
the black clouds passing to our north.
The other storms stayed just to our south, though they were only a few
miles away. There was a lot of lightning
in the distance, but it was too far away for photography. Christy headed to the tent early, exhausted
from a long day in the car. I stayed up
for a bit to watch the show, but I wasn’t far behind her.
Back to South Dakota
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Please remember to Leave No Trace!