So, on Thursday, June 27th, we woke up in our tents in the Badlands to a bright and sunny day. We packed up our stuff and made our hike back to the car. We did not try to use the GPS to find the car and ended up navigating the dunes a little bit just by feel. The walk seemed a little longer going back than it did going out, just because the dunes where we expected the car to be were different from where it actually was. But we eventually found the car, loaded all our stuff in, and headed off to our first next destination, which was Wall Drug, in the city of Wall.
Wall Drug is well known for being advertised the entire way across South Dakota. There were billboards practically every five feet telling you to go to Wall Drug, and for the most part, they were all distinct, saying different things. One of the major themes of the billboards was that you could get a cup of coffee for just five cents, and the ice water was free! We arrived pretty early, so some of the attractions in the store were not open, but we got to peek inside through the windows of some of them.
We sat in the cafe at the back of Wall Drug for breakfast and got some reasonable food. I also got my five-cent coffee, and Riley got his free ice water. There was a wooden box where you could deposit a nickel and take a mug to fill with coffee, which is pretty unique.
Fully fueled up for breakfast, we headed out from Wall toward Rapid City to get to our main attractions for the day. Our first stop was Dinosaur Park, a little park with sculpted dinosaurs at the top of a mountain in Rapid City. The dinosaurs were kind of neat, if maybe not exactly to scale. The T-Rex has a booty that J-Lo would envy.
From Dinosaur Park, we went to the Cosmos Mystery Area, which is an area in the mountains where the gravity is different than in other places in the world. They took us on a tour of their cabin at the Cosmos Mystery Area, where you can stand on the wall, watch balls roll in the wrong direction, and have some crazy gravity experiences. That was a kitschy, backward kind of fun and a good stop. From there, we rolled on to Mount Rushmore.
Mount Rushmore has those four presidents waiting for you: Washington, Roosevelt, Jefferson, and Lincoln, all up there carved into the mountain, looking down at you. We parked in the lot and walked out through the flags for all the states. It was, as they say about these things, majestic. We didn’t spend a lot of time there but we did grab a lemonade from the stand before we moved on to locate Crazy Horse.
Crazy Horse is a monument near Mount Rushmore that is somewhat bigger in scale and scope. The trick, though, is that Crazy Horse has been under construction for years and is still somewhat incomplete. There isn’t much there to look at, just a face of a Native American and his hand kind of pointing out over the horizon. He’s supposed to have a whole torso and horse, but neither of those things is really evident, except that there is a rock there to be carved. So, in terms of being impressed by these monuments, it was less impressive than Rushmore. However, there was a Native American exhibit with a bunch of items in it to look at at the base of the monument.
After that, we stopped in Custer at the Custer Deli for lunch. We ate a couple of tasty sandwiches. That was a good food stop. We bought some souvenirs at the store across the street. Custer’s a tiny little tourist town, but it was neat to stop there. From there, we rode on to our final monument for the day, the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. So, we left South Dakota and went to Wyoming.
The Devil’s Tower is, scientists think, the crystallized magma of a volcano in the tube of the volcano, where the dirt has eroded around it. After all these years, all you can see is that vertical column of hardened rock. This monument was prominently featured in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I remember it from my childhood as a place where all these people dreamed about this location and then went there and met aliens.
When we visited Devil’s Tower there were no aliens except for in the gift shop. And boy, was that rock impressive. I think that, of the three big monuments we saw that day, not counting the Dinosaur Park or the Cosmos Mystery Area, Devil’s Tower was probably the most impressive of the three. It’s an entire football field taller than the Washington Memorial! It’s an amazing natural wonder that is enormous and impressive, so it’s no wonder that it was our first national monument. You can see it from miles and miles away, which is pretty wild.
After we stopped for a brief perusal of the gift shop, we left the Devil’s Tower and came down around the monument. On our way out, the wind started picking up, and there was a giant dust storm and some heavy thunderstorm. Seeing and hearing the wind blow through the trees on the hill, Riley and I moved the car up behind a trading post to take cover from the extreme wind, not really knowing what to do. It was pretty scary for a minute or two. When it started to look clearer, we pulled the car out and headed straight south as fast as we could, which got us away from the storm. In the rearview mirror, we could see the angry clouds around Devil’s Tower, which was wild.
Back on the road, we took 90 west again to Gillette, where we made a newly scheduled hotel stop we hadn’t planned initially. We originally thought we would camp around Devil’s Tower, but instead decided that after two days of camping, it might be nice to shower. Frankly, after the storm with the wind and rain, it seemed the best idea was to stop at the hotel anyway.
We got a hotel in Gillette, stopped at the pizza place next door for some food, and then crashed in preparation for our next day of travel.