May 31, 2013: A Day in Chamberlain
	May 29, 2013: A Day in the Black Hills
	Return to the Index for Our South Dakota Trip

Today, Ron and Prudence and Fred and I are going to drive back to Chamberlain from Rapid City. On the way, we're going to tour through Badlands National Park. As it turned out, we also made a stop at Wall Drug.

A Stop at Wall Drug

Before we left Rapid City, Fred wanted to find some plants that Guy had wanted but didn't have time to look for while he was here, so we found a nursery that carried them and made a slight detour out of our way to go there. Then we headed east on I-90.

The drive to Wall, South Dakota took a while, but with our conversations the ride was very pleasant. There wasn't a lot to look at out the window, though, just the endless rolling hills under a very big sky. I don't think that Ron actually intended to stop at Wall, SD, but he needed gas anyway, so we thought we'd kill a couple of birds with one stone and show Wall Drug to them.

The best way into the town of Wall is actually the same exit as for the Badlands, but Ron took the exit before, so we came into town a different way that when Fred and I had stopped here in 2006. We got our gas and then drove downtown to the famous Wall Drug.

I first became aware of Wall Drug in 1976 when Tony Hirsch and I drove across country from Chicago. We traveled along I-90, and just west of Minneapolis we began to see large billboards for Wall Drug. There were a lot of them, even though Wall was over five hundred miles away. (That would be like seeing signs for San Antonio hotels just south of Oklahoma City!)

It began as a drug store offering free ice water to try to get folks to stop in on their way across South Dakota. How it became the huge place that it is today, selling an amazing variety of merchandise in a Wal-Mart-sized building, is quite an entertaining story, so I've grabbed it from their website (oh, yes, they sell all their stuff online as well) and put it in the scrollable window at left.

Actually, Wall Drug wasn't a surprise for any of us by the time we got there. If you are curious as to where, exactly, "there" is, you can have a look at the sign on the side of the building.

We had already seen a number of signs for Wall Drug since leaving Rapid City- maybe ten of them. And I understand that coming from the west, there is actually a billboard for Wall Drug somewhere in western Montana!

Anyway, we found a place to park and walked down the street to an entrance. The building extends for a long block, and we took a few interesting pictures outside; there are clickable thumbnails for some of them below:

We thought this would be a good place for lunch, so we got in line to order some burgers and stuff. (Good thing we did, for no sooner had we queued up than a couple of large tour buses apparently disgorged their contents and the line quadrupled in length.) While we were waiting for the food to come up, I thought I'd go see if I could find the child-size moccasins that Guy had been looking for, so I wandered off through the amazing building. They had EVERYTHING it seemed, in the series of connected buildings that is Wall Drug. I found the moccasins- rather a large selection of them, so I called Guy to describe them and see which ones he wanted. Back in the dining room we had our lunch. (We even found that same rhubarb wine Fred had yesterday.) There were a number of carved Indians in the room, and Fred took pictures of most of them. Use the clickable thumbnails below to have a look:

After lunch, we headed off through town and south on South Dakota Route 240 to the Badlands National Park.

Badlands National Park

We crossed back over the Interstate and took South Dakota 240 to and through the Pinnacles Entrance Station. The woman on duty was kind enough to point out that if there was a "senior" in the car, then we should buy a Senior Park Pass instead- the entire car would pay less and whoever owned the card would get discounted or free entry to all the national parks, monuments, wetlands, grasslands, memorials, etc. (So I got one.)

As we drove into the park itself, Fred was taking pictures out the car window of the incredibly diverse scenery that we drove through, and here are two typical views:

NOTE: During our time here in the Badlands, we took a great many pictures- between and at each of the stops we made. I realized when doing this page that in total there were way too many thumbnails for you to click on individually to see even the best of the pictures we took. So what I have done is to put just a representative picture or two at each of the stops we made, reserving the rest of them for a slideshow that will come at the end of our trip through the Badlands. The pictures will be grouped with headings in the slideshow, those sections in the same order as the body of this part of the photo album page. That way, will know, when you are going through the slideshow pictures at your own pace, which pictures were taken where. So if you just want an overview of the Badlands, you can get that without clicking on lots of thumbnails. But if you want to see more of the beauty of this iconic National Park, I hope you will spend a few easy minutes and go through the slideshow as well.

Today, the four of us are going to repeat the drive that Fred and I made in 2006- going west to east on the Park Loop Road from the Pinnacles Entrance station to the Northeast Entrance. This is, essentially, South Dakota highway 240.

We stopped at as many of the overlooks as we thought Ron and Prudence would enjoy. After a while, the scenery does become repetitive, but almost every overlook and pull-off had something really interesting to see.

For our drive through the Park, I'll just put each major stop under its own heading, and, if you want, you can follow along by returning to this map to see just where each point of interest was.

Occasionally, I may include an aerial view of the overlook or feature, although I should point out that the aerial views don't show either the incredible colors that we saw or give a really good impression of the topography. But they are interesting sometimes because you can see from the air some of the same features we photographed from the ground.

So with that said, let's make our first stop at the Pinnacles Overlook.

The Pinnacles Overlook

Our first stop inside the Park was at the Pinnacles Overlook. Below, left, you can see an aerial view of the Pinnacles Overlook, and this will help you orient yourself to the pictures we took here.

The Pinnacles Overlook provided a good introduction for Ron and Prudence to the beauty of the Badlands, and we began with a group portrait at this overlook:

Fred and I have been here before, and I have to point out that the weather today was much cloudier and more dismal than it was on our first visit. I could see that the weather was trying to clear, and I hoped that it would do so soon, for it is the sunlight that brings out the spectacular color of this wild area.

In the picture at left, you can see a typical view from here at the overlook. The lack of sunshine mutes the banded colors of the sandstone all around us. Even so, this first view of the nature of the rock here in the National Park was impressive. The views of the Badlands from the Pinnacles Overlook were pretty neat; here is another good one:

You will find more excellent pictures taken from the actual overlook in the slideshow at the end of our tour of the Badlands.

It was at this overlook that we learned that, instead of being purely sedimentary in nature, the Badlands formations were actually volcanic in origin, although water action certainly played a part. We also noticed that, in many a small valley in the Badlands there can be some relatively thick vegetation, although it is more normal to see very little.

Both Fred and I made panoramic pictures from here. Fred's panoramas are done inside his camera; all he has to do is slowly sweep his camera across the area he wants to photograph. The panorama he took is below:

For my panorama, I took five pictures and stitched them together later. The result is below:

There was a long walkway out to a viewpoint, and I noticed Fred had already headed out there, so I went out to join him. Here is Fred at the end of the walkway. I'll wind up our stop here with two more pictures Fred took from the end of the walkway; you will find more of them in the slideshow at the end of our Badlands visit:

He made two other panoramas of note, and you can see them below:

The Yellow Mounds Overlook

We got in the car and headed off from the Pinnacles Overlook. We drove slowly, amazed by all the scenery around us. Fred and I had been here before, but when we were, there was not nearly so much green, so it looked different to us. At one point, we slowed down a great deal so I could photograph some roadside wildlife.

For his part, Fred was pretty much leaning out the window all the way along, taking lots and lots of pictures. The clouds seemed threatening, and they made most of the pictures look a bit dismal, but when the light was right, the colors of the hills really stood out.

Fred must have taken fifty pictures on the way to our next overlook; here are a couple of good ones:

You will find more of the good pictures that Fred took as we traveled from the Pinnacles Overlook to the Yellow Mounds Overlook in the slideshow at the end of our visit.

After a quarter hour or so, we came to the Yellow Mounds Overlook. The overlook was on a high point, and looked out across a valley towards the northeast. The road ahead wound down into that valley, and there was another stopping place down among the rounded yellow hills.

The views from here at the overlook were pretty neat, and there was again a walkway you could take out away from the road for better views. Here are a couple of the views from here:

I have more pictures taken from the Yellow Mounds Overlook, but I have put them into the slideshow that you'll find at the end of our visit to the Badlands NP. I also took a series of pictures to construct a panorama of the view from here, and you can see the panorama below:

The Burns Basin Overlook

Between the Yellow Mounds Overlook and our next stop at Burns Basin, the weather, which had been very cloudy, kind of dismal and a little threatening, began to clear up, and by the time we got to Burns Basin, we had blue sky and puffy white clouds. The pictures we took of the Badlands changed dramatically. Here are two pictures to show the difference:

Leaving the Yellow Mounds Overlook

Arriving at Burns Basin

I took a series of pictures to show how the weather cleared up between Yellow Mounds and Burns Basin. The first and last of them are above, and the remaining six are in the slideshow at the end of our visit.

At the Burns Basin Overlook, there was again a long walkway that led out to a viewing platform that offered some of the best views yet of the Badlands, and we started out soon after we arrived. The view at left looks south.

It was just after we arrived at the Burns Basin Overlook that the skies really began to clear. Off to the north, it was still cloudy and a bit threatening, but, actually, the cloud formations were quite beautiful. Below is one picture that Fred took to show the clearing sky; it was taken shortly after we arrived at Burns Basin.

Fred took additional pictures of the cloud formations on the way to Burns Basin and just after we arrived. I think that you will find them interesting, and they are in the slideshow at the end of our visit.

All four of us walked out to the viewpoint and the three of us took quite a few pictures. I tried a movie, but the wind was fairly brisk and so there was too much wind noise for me to include it here. Our pictures will have to suffice and below are two of the best of them.

There are more pictures from this overlook, but I have chosen to put them in the slideshow that you'll find at the end of our visit to Badlands National Park.

I thought this would be an excellent place to take a large panorama. There was a fixed railing that I could lean against to hold the camera at the same height, so I carefully took a series of seven pictures, merging them together into the panoramic view that you can look at using the scrollable window below:

The White River Valley Viewpoint

The driving was a lot more pleasant now that the sun was out, and our trip from the Burns Basin Overlook to the next viewpoint offered a great deal of beautiful scenery.

The views from here were really spectacular, made all the more beautiful as a result of the clearing sky. The sunlight brought out the bands of color in the formations quite clearly, and the contrast of the colored rock and the blue sky was dramatic. One of the first things I did was to make a movie (the wind had died down quite a bit) of the scene in front of us, and you can watch the movie with the player below:

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible) From the White River Valley Viewpoint

The scene was so beautiful that between Fred and myself we must have taken forty or fifty pictures. I certainly can't include all of them here, but a couple of representative views might suffice:

In my picture at right, you can see the expanse of Badlands National Park. The Park road runs right through the area of banded hills, but you can see that far in the distance there is more vegetation, as you are on the valley floor. It seems as if you can see forever.

In Fred's picture below, you can see more clearly how the stone has been eroded away into gullies, washes, and shallow canyons. The rock here is weathering rapidly, geologically speaking:

As I said, we took a large number of very good pictures here at the White River Valley Viewpoint, and I want you to be able to see more of them, so I will put another ten or so into the slideshow that you'll find at the end of this section devoted to our visit to Badlands NP.

I also set something of a record here at the viewpoint- I took 18 separate pictures and was able to merge them all together successfully into a single panoramic view that sweeps from the northeast end of the parking area and loop road, all across the view in front of me to the south and west and continuing on to the northwest end of the parking area. I'd never attempted to stitch together so many pictures before, but I think the result turned out well. You can use the scrollable window below to survey the scene:

A Drive Out Into the Badlands

Just east of the White River Valley viewpoint, we found a road that headed south out away from the main road and into the Badlands proper. I think it was a road leading to some sort of group activity site; we just wanted to see where it went. We drove about two miles down it, admiring the scenery:

Eventually, we turned around to return to the main road. Fred was taking pictures all the while, and in addition to the two above he took a number of other very nice pictures, and I have put them into the slideshow that you will find at the end of our Badlands visit.

At the Ben Reifel Visitor Center

We continued along the Loop Road for a few more miles, enjoying the scenery in what had become a very pleasant, sunny afternoon. We passed iconic, amazing scenery, along the entire drive:

As with the other sections of our visit to the Badlands, I have other pictures from our drive to the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, but will put them into the slideshow you will find at the end of our visit.

The Loop Road eventually brought us to the same Visitor Center that Fred and I stopped at in 2006. When we were here by ourselves we used the center as the starting point for two hikes- one long and one short- that took us out into the Badlands and out of sight of roads and civilization. Today, with Ron and Prudence along, we didn't plan on doing any hiking, but just stopping in to the Center to look at the exhibits.

The scenery around the Visitor Center was just as pretty as any we'd seen on the way along the loop road:

We took a number of pictures before we went into the Visitor Center; a few were members of our party posing at the Visitor Center sign, but we also took more good pictures looking around at the landscape. Inside, Fred took some very good pictures of a few of the exhibits. I have put all these pictures into the slideshow that appears below at the end of our visit.

We wandered around in the Visitor Center for a while; I think that Ron sat in on a movie about the Badlands while Fred and I walked through the small museum and the gift shop. Fred is interested in all things buffalo, and found some artwork and artifacts depicting them. After forty-five minutes or so, we were all ready to head on out on the Loop Road, heading back to I-90. Before we leave, though, I want to show you another of the panoramic views that Fred created with his camera:

The Big Badlands Overlook

From the Visitor Center, the Loop Road headed north-northeast towards the park exit and I-90 beyond. As we were driving along, Fred was taking pictures out the car windows, but I rolled down my window to make a movie of the scenery as we passed.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible) The Loop Road in Badlands NP

When I reviewed the movie for this album, I found that there was so much wind noise (naturally) that it detracted from the movie itself. So for this album, I've eliminated the audio. You can watch this "silent movie" with the player at left. There was a lot of nice scenery before our last stop:

There are some other good pictures I want to include from the drive from the Visitor Center to our last stop, and I will put them in the slideshow that is coming up shortly.

Our last stop was at the Big Badlands Overlook, where we were again treated to expansive views of the northeast corner of Badlands National Park. I think you'll agree that the vistas were amazing:

The Badlands National Park Slideshow

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

All through this section, I've been saying that instead of providing a hundred or so thumbnails for you to click on individually to see our pictures from the various stops we made, I would show you a couple of views from each stop and then put the remaining views into a slideshow. And I kept saying that this slideshow would appear at the end of our visit to the National Park.

While, that time has arrived and the slideshow is at left. There are almost a hundred pictures in it, grouped by the various stops we made. Each group has a "title slide" so that you can remember where each group of pictures was taken. Since you don't have to open and close a window for each image, you will be able to move through the slideshow in just a few minutes- depending on the interest you have in examining each image. I hope you will look at the entire show, for each picture is worthwhile.

To view the slideshow, just click on the image at left and I will open the slideshow in a new window. In the slideshow, you can use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to the next, and the index numbers in the upper left of each image will tell you where you are in the show. When you are finished looking at the pictures, just close the popup window.

Soon after the last overlook, we passed out of the National Park via the northeast portal, and a few miles later reached I-90 once again. Then we headed east to arrive in Chamberlain about an 90 minutes later, and soon we were back at St. James Church.

Dinner in Chamberlain

After relaxing at the Rectory for a while, waiting for Guy to finish up with his daily responsibilities at the church, we headed across the Missouri River to the Cedar Shores Resort for dinner.

We had thought we would eat outside at the resort's restaurant, so we got one of the tables on the patio (where the picture at left was taken). From here, there were great views across the river towards Chamberlain; actually, we were right across the river from St. Joseph's Indian School- which we plan on visiting tomorrow. But it was to chilly outside that we got our drinks and headed into the restaurant proper, where we had a very nice meal.

On our way out, Fred snapped this picture of the Cedar Shores Resort lobby.

Evening at the Chamberlain Overlook

Three days ago, Guy had brought Fred and I up to a hilltop above the Indian School that offered wonderful views of all of Chamberlain and the Missouri River flowing past. You probably saw those pictures a few pages ago. Guy wanted Ron and Prudence to experience the views as well, so after dinner we crossed back to the east side of the Missouri and then went through downtown Chamberlain and up the road that ascends the hill above the Indian School. At the overlook, we parked and walked to the same spot where we'd been the previous time.

The view of Chamberlain in the evening was pretty impressive- and quite beautiful. If I were Guy and lived here, I'd come to this overlook frequently- just to sit and admire the view and nature's handiwork. Fred used his camera to make a panoramic picture of the scene, and I have put that view below:

This brought our long day to a close. Tomorrow, we'll be spending another day here in Chamberlain with Guy.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	May 31, 2013: A Day in Chamberlain
	May 29, 2013: A Day in the Black Hills
	Return to the Index for Our South Dakota Trip