Day 3 (July 6): How To See South Dakota In a Day

Total Driving Distance: 176.9 miles (trip total: 1,668.7 miles)

States Traveled To: South Dakota

Main Activities: Badlands National Park, Wall Drug Store, Minutemen Missile Museum, the Story of Wounded Knee Museum, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial

We began Day 3 by hiking many different trails in the Badlands. The first one, the Cliff Shelf Nature Trail, was a short walk with gorgeous views of the Park. The next one, the Notch Trail, took about an hour round trip and ended on top of a cliff with a view of the entire park. Along the trail we saw a toad, some deer, plenty of cacti, signs for rattlesnakes, and the biggest dandelions I have ever seen in my life. When you're hiking in the Badlands, it looks and feels like you are in another world, or on another planet, or in "Land of the Lost." It is weird.

Here's the ladder we had to climb:

Here's a video from the top of the trail:

Leaving Badlands, we took the 30-mile Badlands Loop Road, a gorgeous route that takes you through the entire Park.

Our next stop was the Wall Drug Store, a place we had seen signs for since Iowa (the signs are the store's gimmick, they have been placed all around the world to attract people there, including the South Pole, Europe, and South Africa). The store itself was actually pretty cool. We had some of the advertised "Free Ice Water" and "5 cent coffee" which was actually really good. Other sites in the store included a Traveler's Chapel, a giant T-Rex, a plastic Mount Rushmore, and a homeade donut factory (the donuts were amazing).

Across the street from the Wall Drug was the Story of Wounded Knee Museum, which is actually pretty far from the site of Wounded Knee. The small, privately-funded museum was well put together and very informative.

On our way towards Mount Rushmore, we decided to drive back east a few miles to see the Minutemen Missile Museum, which turned out to be closed. Nevertheless, we decided to drive out to the site to see where the Cold War missile pointed at Moscow was secretly hidden (about a quarter mile off the interstate).

It took us about an hour to drive to Mount Rushmore, and along the way we stopped at a Target and a Walmart to pick up a few necessities: ice for the cooler, a USB memory card reader for my camera, and a $3 copy of "Hot Rod". Then we headed to Mount Rushmore.

Our first thought on seeing one of the most famous sites in America was that it looked fake, almost computerized. I guess we had seen it so many times in movies, books, or magazines that it was hard to believe it was real once we actually got there. It was a quite a site to see:

Okay that is just a vending machine at Mount Rushmore, here is the real thing:

You can really only look at Mount Rushmore for so long, so we left after about fifteen minutes and headed over to the extremely popular Crazy Horse Memorial, which turned out to be even cooler than Mount Rushmore, even though it is not even a quarter complete (after 70 years of working on it). His head alone is bigger than all four heads of Mount Rushmore. It is hard to tell how big it really is from far away. To get some perspective, that small hole under his arm could easily fit a ten-story building into it.

We arrived at Crazy Horse just in time to see the short movie about it, which told us that it was pretty much just one man that began creating the whole thing. He worked on it alone for ten or so years, then got married and had ten kids/workers to help him with the construction. Here is what the Memorial will look like when it's done:

The "Legends in Light" show at 9:30 was awesome. They projected lasers onto the mountain and told the story of Crazy Horse, the sculptor (Korzcak), and ended with a strange playing of "Proud to be an American", a song that we thought Crazy Horse wouldn't be too crazy about hearing.

We ended the night at another KOA, about fifteen miles from Crazy Horse. We fell asleep almost as soon as we got there.