Road Trip, Part IV

Tuesday, May 24: Checked out of the motel around 8.30 am and headed off on the four hundred and fifteen mile drive to Mount Rushmore and Wind Cave National Park. Quite an uneventful drive again, but I did notice a gradual change in the landscape. Drier, and even a few real hills en route.

A friend of mine had told me earlier that I must stop at Badlands National Park along the way, and while I hadn’t planned on doing so, when I actually caught a glimpse of what I would be missing, I couldn’t resist. The Badlands have an absolutely breathtaking half-lunar, half-Grand Canyon-esque landscape that has been tens of millions of years in the making. Originally a sea, it has gone through several transitions as evidenced by the multi-coloured layers in the rock formations, and is a haven for palaeontologists. A twenty-odd mile detour off the I-90 takes one through the Northern section and I walked a couple of the shorter trails and spent a beautifully peaceful three hours there, taking pictures of the landscape as well as a number of birds that dwelt there. In fact, hearing continuous birdsong was a shamefully novel experience, and I almost didn’t want to leave.

Continuing on, I reached the Mount Rushmore area around 5 pm. I had planned on camping in Wind Cave National Park for the three nights that I was there, but city life has made me soft, because when I arrived I lost some of my enthusiasm for it. The campground and the park were quite remote and basic, it was cloudy and starting to rain, and the park abounds with bison (there was a herd crossing the highway just outside the Visitor Centre when I entered the park!). I wasn’t sure if being trampled to death by a two thousand pound beast should be part of my first solo camping experience.

So after I picked up some supplies at Hot Springs about twelve miles south of Wind Cave, I retraced my route up to Custer, about twenty miles from Mount Rushmore. Here I checked into a Best Western, which actually turned out to be a good thing, because I was finally able to take care of some pending correspondence and phone calls. Had dinner in a restaurant called the Captain’s Table just outside the motel, and called it a night.