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National Parks Road Trip & Alaska Sea/Land Cruise - April-June 2015
Badlands National Park
Our final destination was Badlands National Park. On the way to Badlands we stopped at Thunderhead Falls, an underground waterfall. At the motel in Keystone we read a brochure about Thunderhead, it sounded different and was only a few miles out of our way to Badlands. Google Maps sent us to a house that we think are the owners of Thunderhead (the name on the mailbox was the same as of the owners). We backtracked a few hundred yards and saw a sign for Thunderhead. When we reached the end of the road we were not sure we were in the right place until we saw the mining train the brochure had mentioned. We checked out the train then looked for something that might be an entrance. Another couple arrived and headed down a trail with a bridge that crossed a river, so we went that way too. We found a small shed where a teenage boy told us it was $7.50 each, we decided that since we were there anyways we might as well pay the $15 and see the falls. We went into an old gold mine and discovered there were no lights, we could not even see the other couple who were just a short ways in front of us. We decided to get flashlights from the car, but stopped to ask the attendant about the lights. He smiled shyly and said "OOPS!", then reached and turned on the lights. We went back into the mine and walked to the end where the waterfall is, maybe 150 yards or so. The fall is not very high, but the volume of water is fairly impressive. There had been a creek above the mine, the mine caved in making a hole that the creek falls into, then the creek flows through and out of the mine. A short way below the mine entrance the creek flows into the river we had crossed. It probably isn't worth $15 per couple, but we were not unhappy that we visited this, to us, unique falls.
We had directions to Badlands National Park that avoided the interstate and would have us drive through the sage creek area. When we were a short ways past the downtown area of Rapid City the directions said to make a u-turn go 31 miles and make a u-turn. The road we were on was a divided road with places to make u-turns every so often, we think the directions meant to use one of the u-turn lanes to make a left turn onto an intersecting road then go 31 miles and do a similar thing. The road we think we were suppose to take looked like an old farm road that would not have u-turn lanes. Not wanting to drive over 30 miles to discover we had gone the wrong way we opted to go back into Rapid City and catch the interstate. On the interstate we saw signs for well over 100 miles advertising Wall Drug. When we stopped at a rest area with an information booth, we asked which exit was the best one to use to go to the Badlands and also asked what this Wall Drug was and if it was a good place to get lunch. We were told that Wall Drug was an interesting place and we could get lunch there. Also, if we went two blocks from Wall Drug and turned right we would be on the road that goes to and through Badlands National Park. It would take several paragraphs to describe Wall Drug, so here's a link to the Wall Drug website. We spent about an hour exploring Wall Drug and another half hour eating lunch which was very good and reasonably priced. On the wall near the table where we sat are plaques with the names of ranchers and their cattle brands. When we noticed the plaques we discovered Dale was sitting directly below one with the name Dale on it. We were glad we stopped at Wall Drug and as it turned out we were better off not trying to go through the Sage Creek area as, according to the person at the information booth, it is a not well kept-up, more than 25 mile long, dirt road.
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On our way from Wall to Badlands National Park we passed through a small section of Buffalo Gap Grasslands, where we saw a few pronghorn. Once we entered Badlands, we knew why so many people told us we had to go here on our trip. We immediately started seeing really beautiful scenery with rocky cliffs topped by grassy meadows. In the valleys between the cliffs were magnificent rock formations surrounded by grassy meadows. The rock formations and rocky cliffs were multi-colored with the colors blending in such a way as to produce some of the most beautiful scenery we have seen anywhere. An interesting feature is the intermingling of pointed or round bare rock formations and flat topped rocky mesas on which a grassy meadow is growing. The road through Badlands is 25-30 miles, with the many stops we made it took 4-5 hours. For the whole time we were in Badlands we were totally awed by God's wonderful creation. Dale took between 150 and 200 pictures, most of which are great pictures, but none can capture the beauty like the human eye. God not only created this wonderful world, in the human eye He also created the perfect means of viewing His creation. Ernie's toughest task with developing this page was not in finding enough great pictures, but rather in the almost impossible task of choosing which ones not to include so as to have a reasonable number of pictures in the slide-show. Dale's camera has a panorama setting which she tried a few times. This produced some wonderful pictures hopefully viewers will get at least some idea of how wonderfully beautiful this spot in God's creations is. One sign we saw stated the park consists of 244,000 acres, that is 244,000 acres of some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Ernie decided to not try to come up with superlatives to use for the scenery, so there is no caption on many of the scenery pictures in the slide-show, letting the viewer add his/her own superlatives. We did see some wildlife such as: pronghorn, bighorn sheep, bald eagle, jack rabbit, and a blackbird that the ranger told us the full name of but neither of us remember what it was. Not wildlife, but we saw quite a bit of cattle at the ranches bordering the park.
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jul 13 2015