Day 5: Badlands, Mt Rushmore, Devil's Tower

Ed: Posting again from Bozeman, MT. If you haven't had the chance yet, look down and read the post before this (I just posted that too). This entry was written on Friday morning, the one before was from Thursday. Pictures and Yellowstone adventures to come!

Relaxing in a hotel room at Yellowstone. We have two days of hiking and camping ahead of us here, and then two more days at Glacier National Park. Originally, we were planning to camp out for our entire stay here, but the campgrounds were full when we arrived late in the evening last night.

We left the Badlands at dawn yesterday morning. Unfortunately, this meant that we missed the Minuteman Missile National Monument, which didn’t open until 8. Instead, we proceeded straight to Mt. Rushmore. To be fair, I hadn’t been expecting much: just four Presidential faces carved on a mountain. It wasn’t until we were standing there, and looking up at Washington’s nose that the magnitude struck it. Mt. Rushmore is really, really big. Ironically, it was supposed to be even bigger: the original design showed all four presidents down to their waist. You can still kind of see this. If you look carefully, you can see Lincoln’s fingers holding on the lapels of his coat.

From Mt. Rushmore, we proceeded to Devil’s Tower (it’s the place where ET’s spacecraft sets down on). It jutted out of the landscape like some ancient monolith, made up of connected columns of stone. According to the signs there, the native Americans saw it as the scratches of a gigantic bear. I can definitely see the resemblance there. To me, it looked like a lone, massive column of some Greco-Roman temple. We got out of the car and took the short, mile-long trail around the tower, climbing into a region filled with massive boulders which had fallen off of the Tower. High above us, climbers scaled the peak, almost indistinguishable from the trees, growing seemingly out of the rock itself at precarious angles.

I must put in a word for the breathtaking beauty of Wyoming. The land is indescribably vast here: we passed rolling hills for hours. Farms, cattle ranches and little towns seemed to disappear in the vast swathes of grassland, like little islands in a vast green sea. And then, we passed through mountain valleys, framed on both sides by snow-capped peaks, and gorgeous mountainsides. Rivers ran wild and untamed; cascades of fresh water, tumbling down the mountains, rushing towards some unknown horizon.

I’ll save my reflections on Yellowstone for next time. I feel that we haven’t spent very much time here yet, and our experiences so far would be biased by unfortunate misadventures due to our arrival late in the evening.

Day 4: On the Road to the Badlands

(I wrote this two days ago, before we started exploring Yellowstone. We're in Bozeman, MT at the moment, and this is the first chance we've had to get Internet access. I'll post about Yellowstone (and put up pictures) as soon as I've got the time to write about it.)

We’re spending our first night under the stars in the Badlands. The view from here is breathtaking: free from the glare of night-lights, we can finally see all the stars. Gone is the silent roar of traffic, the distant whine of police sirens, the raging parties across the hall. The chirp of crickets, and the howl of a distant wolf is all we hear.

We drove over 500 miles today, starting from Minneapolis and going straight south to Austin, MN, and then straight west on the I-90. We made three stops along the way. The first stop was at the SPAM Museum. Going in, there was a wall made of thousands of cans of SPAM. This was followed by exhibits about the history of SPAM, games for kids and a big SPAM-themed gift shop.

The second pit stop was at the giant statue of the Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN. This was a bit of a let-down, since even the nearby Dairy Queen sign was bigger. We were expected the Green Giant to be, well, gigantic, not merely oversized. The third stop, at the Corn Palace of Mitchell, SD, was a little more satisfying. It was unabashedly tacky, like any other roadside attraction, but there was also majesty to it. The building itself looked like a Russian Orthodox cathedral on the plains, but covered with murals made from corn.

Perhaps the best part of the drive was the drive itself. We escaped the shadow of a rainstorm in the morning, going past the corn-fields of Minnesota and South Dakota (shadowed by an occasional windmill, like gentle giants watching over them). Crossing the Missouri River, the farms gave way to acres and acres of rolling grassland, with its roaming herds of free-range cattle.

The beauty of this place is simply breathtaking. We got 200 feet into the park when the prairie gave way suddenly to a landscape of weathered mesas and jagged peaks erupting from the grass. We ran out to a narrow spit of rock to get a better view, ignoring the fact that both sides fell away to hundred-feet-high cliffs. Later, after getting to our camp site, we decided to take a little trek back into the mountains. We cut through tall grass, following the dry streambeds, and ventured into narrow canyons carved out of the crumbing rock. We then went up, at times climbing, accompanied by passing groups of grazing deer, steady going up the mountain until we stood on a grassy knoll looking out high above the South Dakota landscape. Like a jagged gash, the peaks of the Badlands cuts across the rolling grasslands, erupting in pinnacles of red rock, rounded mounds circumscribed by layers of sedimentary rock, like little clouds over the landscape of green.

Tomorrow, we head further west, to Mt. Rushmore and from there, to Yellowstone.