The Parks

It was a whirlwind. My experience at the parks were a whirlwind. What we saw at those (mostly) National Parks almost made me forget that we did a lot of neat things before we even arrived in the Dakotas. My hunch is that Sherry might say the same thing. Joe joined us just in time for the parks. The kids? I'm not sure what their impression of these gems were. I hope they remember them.

I write this a week after returning. I was last in one of them (Theodore Roosevelt) last Thursday. Since returning I've updated an album to scroll through our smart display in the kitchen, and I'm struck by the beauty of what I saw.

I'll let photos do most of the talking here. Here are some of the photos that best represent what we saw at the different parks.

August 2-4: South Dakota
While in the Black Hills we visited Custer State Park, Badlands, and Rushmore. We also got to Wind Cave but an elevator outage meant we couldn't see the inside of that site. Custer and Badlands impressed us the most of these four sites.

Sam and Caroline took turns popping out the sunroof to do some photography at Custer State Park. 

Custer is famous for the buffalo that walk along the roadway on the Wildlife Observation Loop. 

When one allows buffalo to roam along a road, two bulls might just get into a fight along the guard rail. We saw this fight break out in front of our van one evening. 

The van at its dirtiest as we traversed land near Wind Cave and Custer. 

The view from Wind Cave. Prairie as far as one can see. Hard to believe the Black Hills are actually quite close by. 

Rushmore. Construction and crowds took away from the majesty I felt there back in 2004. 

The Needles in Custer State Park. 

Badlands National Park. 

Rams at Badlands. 

Badlands National Park. Note the stormy sky. We had to wait out a pretty ugly rainstorm while there. 

Badlands.

Badlands.

August 5: Fitting in Devils Tower
We had a driving day on August 5 from the Black Hills to Medora. Shifting a small bit to the west allowed us to visit Devils Tower. We had a DVD of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with us and watched it on the way to the site. The tower came into view for us at just about the same time it's revealed in the film.

Devils Tower. It boggles the mind. More majestic up close but hard to photograph. 

Sam and I got to climb a little ways up Devils Tower. Something I liked about many of our parks out West was the freedom to roam off trails. 

August 6-8: Medora, ND
Medora is a small town just outside the gates to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the site I was most interested in seeing that trip. It didn't disappoint. The park is built out of badlands formations in western North Dakota. This is where Theodore Roosevelt and many other starry-eyed adventurers tried to make a fortune out of cattle raising in the 1880s.

Sam examines a meadow muffin at Theodore Roosevelt. 

Sam at the Petrified Forest in Theodore Roosevelt. 

We took a small hike out to this petrified forest on the western rim of the park. Fascinating. 

Theodore Roosevelt N.P.

Sam atop a concretion at Theodore Roosevelt. It's a geographic anomaly found in the North Unit. The concretion, not the Mets fan. 

I find few creatures as pleasant as a prairie dog. Here's one from TR. 

Here's a view from Theodore Roosevelt's North Unit. 

Cliffs at TR's North Unit. 

Caroline near a bend in the Little Missouri. 

The adventure was wonderful. There's a really neat moment in life to be found when the kids' maturity and adults' abilities meet up and make adventuring through these parks fun and possible. Exotic and beautiful in a very rugged way, we saw some sights unlike anything we see in Pennsylvania and which offered an amazing contrast to what we had seen in Hawaii last year. And I'm glad to have had the chance to show my kids as much of the country as we have been able the past two years.