Wickedly Bad Lands. 10/29 (2)

It was a day. Short drive, but long in interesting stuff. I woke up seriously early and thought I could just get on with it and have time at the end of the day. Which was great, as I needed the afternoon nap more than I needed a snooze bar in the morning. Tomorrow I have some weird timing getting to Devil’s Tower and getting to the gift shop when it opens. But in the end I’ll be in Billings. Maybe I’ll check out the pictograph caves.

Badlands

I thought the day looked boring, so in looking for diversions I noticed a badlands loop that looked twisty and not too far off the original path. Turns out it was a National Park, so it was free – though all the buildings were closed, and I counted only one ranger in the whole park. He was manning a speedtrap. The lack of visitors meant I saw few cars, and at no point was I following a lumbering RV down a twisty road, cursing their existence. Today, I merely drank in the curves and enjoyed the drive and the views. I have a note that “sometimes twisties don’t mean fast” and I think it means curvy roads are fun to go stupid fast on – but really only when you’re in the movies.

Another note: “The badlands are so quiet and peaceful and beautiful they make me want to throw up. And not in a bad way.” It was a strange thought following an even stranger feeling. It was just overwhelming enough that I wanted to express my happiness in a way without words or actions. Don’t worry, I didn’t hurl. But I was struck by the quiet. I even recorded some of it. It sounds like absolutely nothing. No highway buzz, no running engine, not even birds or bugs. Just vibrant silence. I think I appreciated not only the silence, but the age. Those rocks have been blowing up and eroding and wearing down and dusting for so very long. They don’t care about you or me or politicians or Netflix original series. They don’t care about anything. They’re just there and they will be there long after we’re gone, no matter how that happens.

My dad would go on and on about glaciers and moraine and ancient lakes. We would groan and try and tune him out. Of course I wish I had paid more attention, but no teen would have. I can’t remember hearing him talk about the badlands but I really wish I had the opportunity to go there with him. I would listen to every. single. word.

Geography

Flat on a map does not do bumpy in real life justice. I didn’t have any assumptions about when I would see mountains, for some reason I thought I would drive across the flat prairie and there they would be. Walls of mountains from one end to the other. Driving into them would be like entering MIrkwood. You would go from one to the other and that’s it.

Apparently that’s not how it happens. Granted, I haven’t seen mountains yet, but I think it’s going to be interesting and surprising in its lack of being surprising, if that makes sense. In Rapid City there were really big hills in the distance, but they didn’t look like mountains. Over the course of the day I would be driving past rolling hills, then moonscape like badlands, more hills that made me wonder about mountains, and then when I cross the border into Wyoming something happened. They were still hills around me. The kind of thing that farmer could walk to the top of and have a nice view. But they got bigger and closer. More frequent. And then less convincing that you could just walk to the top of them. (I have this thing where I want to climb to the top of every hill I see, though I seldom do. Just to see what you could see.)

So I am quite excited for tomorrow and beyond.

The bullshit geographic center of the U.S.

What the actual fuck. So, no it’s not what you think. It’s not the center of the lower 48. It’s the center of the nation. Meaning it includes Hawaii and Alaska. Or.. wait.. no? Now I’m reading on the page on wikipedia that it might have something to do with demographic information?

At the very least, we know that Lebanon Kansas is the center of the lower 48. I can buy that, looks about right. If you add Alaska to the equation it seems like it should be a lot further north than South Dakota. And Hawaii? That’s my main issue. We measure the middle of the space that includes all 50 states. But Hawaii is a quarter of the planet away. How does that stretch to South Dakota?

Ok, fine, maybe I’m a moron. Maybe this is the right place. All of the signs that led me to this monument (and there were many) got me to this town in the middle of nowhere. I was so excited to stand on the marker on the ground (like the 4 corners in the SE US) and say I was in the middle of it all. SO exciting. So when I get there and find out the ACTUAL point it a twenty miles north, likely on private land, I just about lost my shit! Frankly that’s false advertising, and bogus and irresponsible.

Deets

License Plates: ME, MT, Alberta, OR, MD, WY
States: SD,WY
Departed: 7:30am CDT, 22 degrees, mostly sunny skies
Original ETA 12:21 MDT
Arrival: 2:00pm MDT, napped a bit
Weather: Cold, mostly sunny
Budget: Gas TBD, Food below, Hotel below
Food: breakfast latte great, lunch gyro delicious, dinner Reuben fair (coleslaw was so sour it tasted carbonated.) Fries were decent though.
Music: Radiohead – Kid Amnesia, Crystal Method – Tweekend, Crystal Method – The Trip Home (I see what I did there), and I switched to radio near the end of the day, just for variety. In the badlands I went with silence, as it seemed appropriate

Snippets

This is not the shoulder season, it’s more like the armpit season. Between the shutdown closing National places, and the off-season November month, I’m strolling through places uncrowded and driving unblocked by RVs. Bliss
It still awes me when I see the gates on the interstate, and the signs talking about the road being closed in inclement weather. They’re everywhere out here.
There’s a crop that looks like something half the height corn, tan on the bottom and maroon or brown on top. Looked it up, it’s sorghum. And there’s lots of it in South Dakota
I’m going the speed limit and I’m the fastest car on the road. I’m even using google maps to GPS my speed. Is it just that everyone here obeys the speed limit? And by here I mean everywhere but Minnesota?
Saw my first tumbleweed! It tumbled across the highway in front of me.
There has been a lot of construction-like activity. Speed will drop from 80 to 65, down to one lane, maybe see some construction vehicles, then eventually it goes back to 80 and two lanes. I think I’ve done that exercise a dozen times by now.
Wall Drug
- Of course I went there.
- I needed two very common personal items one would get at a drug store. They didn’t have either. I had to go to Target. Everybody at Wall Drug seemed nice, no crowds, no wait for purchase, mostly just empty.
Somewhere in there we switched to the Mountain time zone.
In Wyoming the signs announcing a nearby historical marker have the title of the marker listed below. So you know if it’s something you want to see or something about a vice president 50 years ago.
I really wanted to see some bison. I finally saw three or four in South Dakota, but that was it. I saw more deer in Wyoming than bison in South Dakota.