Minutemen Missile

The last National Park Junior Ranger badge was earned at Minuteman Missile in South Dakota. This site has 3 locations along I90 east of Rapid City. The first is Delta 1 which is available only by tours which are booked out into September. Delta 9 is a little farther east. You can park and get out and walk over to the site of the former missile and look down 4 stories. Each missile was slightly shorter than four cars parked end to end. The third site is ten miles down the road. At this turn off if you go south you enter the Badlands National Park. If you go north you go to the National Park. This park talks about the build up of nuclear arms since the Russians launched a satellite called Sputnick. There is information about bomb shelters. A turtle on an old black and white television sings a song about "Duck and Cover."  A video shows a little boy riding his bike down the street. An atomic bomb goes off in the distance so the boy jumps off his bike, leaves it in the road, runs to the gutter, lies down and covers his head as if that would help.

They had some atomic looking wall paper in that TV room. This was the most disappointing national park I have ever been to.

 

Jewel Cave

This morning we had a tour of Jewel Cave in South Dakota. The dark purple means maganese.

The cave was colder than Wind Cave so I was glad our tour was only 20 minutes long.

Two grand girls earned the junior ranger badge for Jewel Cave and Cave Explorers.

After the tour and the badge work we walked around on the grounds above the cave for awhile.

 

Rushmore and Wind Cave

Today we went to Wind Cave National Park to earn junior ranger badges and hike. Then we went to Mount Rushmore and earned another junior ranger badge.

Wind Cave has a small population of bison but plenty of prairie dogs. We walked to a prairie dog town and sat in the grass for 20 minutes to observe the prairie dog behaviors. We saw canyon wrens This is a lonely bachelor bison.

Later in the afternoon we had a 2 hour tour of Wind Cave.

These are boxwork configurations which are common in Wind Cave but rare elsewhere. This cave is a dry cave. The boxwork are thin sheets of calcite that form a honeycomb pattern. Some are as thin as paper. Others are so thick it would take a hammer to break them.

Badlands

Today we went to the Badlands in South Dakota

The day was hot with a high of 99 degrees.

Hiking was hard to do in the heat.

We ate a  picnic lunch in a shelter. We ate with a cliff swallow.

In the yellow hills the fossils of sea creatures can be found.

A big horned sheep grazes in the grass. This one has a yellow tag on it's foot.

Prairie Dog town.

Granddaughter #2 communes with a prairie dog for quite a few minutes.

 

Pipestone

Today we drove to Pipestone National Monument in SE Minnesota. Here is a rock that looks like a face.

This is the waterfall at Pipestone. Just a thin layer of red pipestone lays under 8 feet of solid, hard, Sioux quartzite.

This is the dignity statue off I-90 near Chandler, South Dakota.

Lewis and Clark staged here for a few weeks.