So, Wednesday morning, we woke up in Palisades State Park nice and chill inside our air-conditioned cabin, which was lovely. We gathered up our stuff and headed out for our day to come. Our first stop on a long driving day was the Corn Palace, a large building decorated with corn. Apparently, they’ve been doing this every year since the 1800s. The outside is covered in different corn, and they come up with a new theme every year. An artist puts together new corn designs each year, and they mark it up with a grid to put all the corn in the right place. It’s like one of those old drawing tests from a magazine, but with corn.
Inside the Corn Palace is a big basketball court with seating where people can watch the basketball game. There’s a stage beyond the court. I assume they put on shows there every so often, considering the history posted on the outside shows different acts over the years, including some famous people from the past that I had never heard of before. They had a bunch of interesting stuff for purchase in the Corn Palace on the basketball court—different shirts, slogans, and souvenirs.
From the Corn Palace, we went to The Depot, a former train depot that had been turned into a small pub and restaurant. We got a couple of sandwiches to head out on the road. At this point, we were thinking that with all the driving, we might miss the open hours of the Badlands Visitor Center, which would hurt our plans because we didn’t exactly know the process/policy for camping the way we wanted to. So, we were really hauling it through southern South Dakota, trying to find our way to the Visitor Center.
Nonetheless, we stopped at a couple of places along the way. The first was the Dignity Statue, at a rest stop overlooking the Missouri River. The Missouri River was more impressive than the Mississippi when we crossed it; it was more expansive and had a longer bridge. We stopped at that rest stop and checked out the Dignity Statue. While driving, we also saw the Skeleton Man walking the Skeleton Dinosaur and got a decent picture of it. That was closely followed by 1880 Town, which we didn’t visit, but it looked like a mock-up of buildings from the 1880s. There were a couple of other sculptures similar to the skeleton dinosaur that we hadn’t expected, too.
Somewhere along the way, we saw a sign that said “crossing into Mountain Time” and suddenly realized we had gained an hour! We realized we had an extra hour to get to the Visitor’s Center, so we were more relaxed about getting there. We made an unscheduled stop at the Minuteman Silo Memorial, which provided information about the silos housing Minuteman nuclear missiles in South Dakota and the Cold War. Although I oppose the concept, which felt in part like a celebration of nuclear proliferation, the exhibit was still informative.
There were children assembling rockets outside, and a park ranger helped them launch the rockets using a turnkey ignition, air compression device. This reminded me of the Fallout show and games I’ve experienced recently, which felt strange. From the Minuteman Silo, we headed to the Ben Reifel Visitor’s Center in the Badlands.
The Badlands were impressive, with mountainous piles of earth created by erosion. As we drove, the road seemed to fall off on the left side, eroding hundreds of feet downward. This erosion created the massive valley below, and it seemed to go on forever.
We spoke with a park ranger about dispersed camping when we arrived at the Visitor’s Center. She informed us of the rules, such as hiking half a mile from the road and not being visible from overlooks. She recommended a location called Conata, and the area we ended up camping in – Deer Haven.
We parked at the Conata overlook and transferred our camping gear into bags. The hiking pack I brought turned out to be much smaller than I had expected, so I used my travel backpack instead, which was still very small. Riley used his versatile carry-on bag. We hauled our gear half a mile off the road, where we couldn’t be seen, and set up camp in Deer Haven.
We found a lovely spot in the Deer Haven area, with many spires of eroded dirt with fascinating striation layers. We took bunches of pictures and set up our camp for the night in a light rain. There were all these little pricker bush things that kept detaching their seeds on all of our clothing, which was super annoying and painful. Many of them somehow made their way into the rim of my sock, which irritated my ankle along with some preexisting mosquito bites. But when we finally figured out where they were coming from, we were mostly able to dodge the irritating seeds.
With the tent set up, we made dinner by rehydrating some of the dehydrated food. We used instant-heat dinners that used only water to heat up instead of requiring a stove. The food was all pretty good, and the scenery was amazing. You could see the remnants of the rain in some of the puddles around. All the sediment in the standing water was pretty dense, which confirms what the rangers were saying about not being able to filter the groundwater for use. Overall, it was a good night of tent camping in the middle of nothing.
It was so quiet out there, except for the prairie dogs, or perhaps it was singing jackalopes. The park rangers gave us a pamphlet that said, “Don’t kiss the prairie dogs.” Not that I would ever kiss a prairie dog, but allegedly, they all have the black plague, so giving them kisses is ill-advised. It’s also a shame that the night was overcast, or we might have gotten a good view of the night sky. Maybe Yellowstone will provide a better view.
Anyway, we slept well and then packed up camp in the morning. It seemed to be a little bit farther even than we thought, but we eventually succeeded at finding the car and set out on our next day of adventure. We put all the stuff back in the car and took a little bit of winding and weaving through the outcroppings as we made our way back towards the car.
Hopefully, we’ll see some monuments on our next day and search for a shower. I don’t know where there might be a shower, but there wasn’t one in our planning, so it might be another day yet. We shall see.