Badlands - South Dakota

About 75 million years ago a shallow sea spread across the Great Plains when the Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now.  This sea covered an area from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and stretched across the land from western Iowa on the east through Wyoming on the west.  As the Rocky Mountains rose under the moving Continental plates, the sea retreated and drained away leaving a sediment layer rich in fossilized animals from the sea.  Now the emerging land experienced a humid and warm climate with abundant rain and developed a dense subtropical forest.  Millions of years later as the climate dried and cooled the forest became savannahs and then the grasslands that they are today.  The ancient soils have collected one of the greatest arrays of fossil mammals on Earth, most of which are now extinct animals.  Some were small and deer-like.  Others resembled sheep.  There were three toed horses and early ancestors of modern pigs.  Saber-toothed cats the size of a leopard shared the land with small Subhyracodon rhinoceros and massive hippopotamus-like animals called Metamynodon.  Squirrel like rodents lived in the trees and ancestral rabbits nibbled on plants below them.

It has only been for 11,000 years that the land supported humans.  First were ancient mammoth hunters.  Much later nomadic tribes followed.  Their lives were built around hunting bison whose range extended from the eastern Rockies all the way to the western Appalachians.  Sioux and later Lakota came to these plains utilizing horses they had acquired from the Spaniards to dominate the land for 100 years from the mid-1700s.  Touching the land gently, they hunted and harvested only what they needed to support their way of life.  Eventually, European trappers, soldiers, miners, cattle farmers and homesteaders displaced the Lakota by introducing wheat fields to cover the prairies and practically eradicating the buffalo to replace them with cattle.

Preserved within the Badlands National Park are nearly 60 species of grass forming what remains of the native grasslands.  These grasses evolved to withstand high winds, long spells of dry weather and frequent fires.  Under the protected conditions in the park, black tailed prairie dogs, muledeer, pronghorn antelope, bison, coyotes and bighorn sheep once again thrive here.  Even one of the rarest of mammals-the black-footed ferret has found its way back to recovery here after being reintroduced in 1999.

This has been a marvelous stop in our travels to an area that is completely new to me.  The colors of the rock and the starkness formed a formidable barrier to the peoples who came here earning the name “Badlands” but I find them to be anything but that.

    

Custer State Park

There is a drive through Custer State Park where one can follow the “wildlife loop” and see the restored buffalo herd, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, wild donkeys, hawks and pronghorn antelope all on one drive within their natural environment. 

One at a time we spotted each of the above types of wildlife and had an opportunity to photograph them.  While I would have liked seeing the buffalo closer than we did, it was still marvelous to see them at all against a backdrop of the golden, rolling hills of South Dakota.  This is their mating season so it was also probably in our best interests that we were a good distance from them.  Saved from extinction, these magnificent animals now enjoy a tranquil life except for a roundup each fall that occurs to brand the current year’s calves.  I would guess that is also a time when they do a count of the population.

The prairie dogs were enjoying their day and the sun with youngsters scampering about while the adults kept watch for the lurking hawk.  The ground squirrel was merely interested in getting from one side of the road to the other when we spotted him.

The donkeys while “wild” have apparently been corrupted by handouts from cars and dutifully blocked traffic looking for any of us to share a treat of some kind.  Oblivious to the cars, they stood in the road going about other business also when a colt began nursing with his mother. 

The pronghorn antelope were warier.  The males seem to stand about alone, while we saw four apparent females wandering in a group.

The film “Dances With Wolves” starring Kevin Costner was filmed in the area.  It is easy to see how you can step back in time driving through the park’s rolling hills with all of its wildlife.  This is when you are grateful the States and the Federal Government have set aside places where we can all enjoy such wonders.

And all of this occurring in just one lovely day.  Life is good.

Native American Beading

The Indian Museum of North America is the largest exhibit of Indian artifacts I have seen yet during our travels.  Decorating their clothing, shoes, headdresses, belts, bags and more with beading was popular and patterns varied from region to region.  The following are but a few of the photos I took of the items on display.  Having worked with beading and jewelry making myself, this display is an inspiration to try making a few of the designs myself.   Anyone who studies beading and designs would be enthralled here.

There was a wall of glass beads that had been donated to the museum that displayed a rainbow of colors in an efficient shelving system for the bottles of beads.  Looming was another method they used to create their designs.  We spent considerable time here and enjoyed lunch before leaving for our third adventure of the day-a hunt for the buffalo herd!

 

Crazy Horse Memorial

In 1948, Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski with his wife Ruth and their ten children relocated to a site near Custer City in the Black Hills of South Dakota to begin work on a mountain sculpture commemorating one of the great heroes of Native American History-Crazy Horse.   From the age of forty until his death in 1982, Korczak Ziolkowski devoted his life to this mountain sculpture.  Ruth continued his work until her death in spring of this year along with seven of their children.  A Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation to enable the work to continue was created over the intervening years and the work under the guidance of the Ziolkowski children continues.  Their work has enabled the completion of a Visitors Center, Museum and College at the site as well as the continuing work of carving the mountain statue.   The entire project has been completed to date without any Federal or State funds.  

Korczak had worked on the Mount Rushmore site prior to beginning this project and although he had no formal training or education, he had achieved acclaim for his works at the 1939 New York World’s Fair thus bringing him to the attention of Chief Standing Bear.  Accepting an offer to build the Memorial with only $174 dollars left to his name, he began his task.  Battling financial hardship, racial prejudice, injuries and advancing age he began a task to sculpt Crazy Horse upon his horse at a scale three times the size of Mount Rushmore.  Knowing the project was larger than his own life span, Korczak left detailed plans and scale models to continue the project.

It is impressive to see and the museum is phenomenal.

   

Sunny Mt. Rushmore

Today we went back to Mount Rushmore and took photos in the sun.  It was beautiful there today.  Here are a couple of shots:

But that was only the beginning of the day's adventures...

Black Hills Petrified Forest

In Greek, the word "petra" means stone and "petrified" means to turn to stone.  Today we visited a very unique and “off the beaten trail” spot to see a petrified cypress forest.  The trip turned out to be so interesting we spent a couple of hours there talking with Scotty, the owner.  West of Rapid City and off of I-90 at South Dakota’s Exit 46 about one mile from the Interstate the earth has preserved a cypress swamp 120 Million years old.  Dating back to the time of dinosaurs when the Black Hills of South Dakota did not exist and the entire area was a flat, tropical swamp similar to cypress swamps that exist now in the southeast.

Cypress trees fell here during that time and became immersed in water.  Then over time sand and silt permeated the open areas of cells making up the tree changing what was once wood eventually to stone.  Then the water receded and the logs were buried in layers of sand.  The now stone logs were buried deeper and deeper by sediment on top of the sand preserving the logs in their stone state.  Eventually, the earth started pushing up the Black Hills and the logs rose with the movement over thousands of years but breaking because of their displacement just as if someone had sawed them into sections.  As time and the elements started wearing away the protective layers above the logs from the hill their resting place had now become, eventually the petrified logs became exposed. Revealing themselves eventually, geologists were able to identify them.  Now they are protected by the owners of this museum in their natural state and in many cases exactly where they fell 120 Million years ago. 

We walked the mile loop through the woods and saw and touched these ancient trees.  The fiber of the wood is still visible in the shape of the stone making up the logs.  A stack of "wood" made up of pieces gathered from other parts of the property truly looked like a cord of wood ready for winter.  In addition to seeing the logs, we watched a very interesting film on the history of the geology of the area, which we carried with us down the road to more fully appreciate what we were seeing in the land around us.  If you are ever in this area, don’t miss this stop.  (note:  everything pictured that looks like wood is in reality stone-the petrified wood.)

Mount Rushmore

Today we went up to see Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which is about a ten-mile drive from the RV Park where we are staying.  I saw this Monument when I was five years old and remember seeing an Indian Chief here at the time.  He spoke to me saying, “How!” as he raised his hand probably mimicking the Western movies of that era.  I think he made more of an impression upon me than seeing the faces of our former Presidents.  Also then there was no massive Visitors Center nor an amphitheater or an evening light show either.  Today a young woman of the Lakota Tribe demonstrates hoop dancing wearing their beautiful traditional beaded clothing. 

We started off under cloudy skies and arrived before any rain had fallen at the Monument with the muted light making for good photographs devoid of shadows.  Eventually the weather came in with rain starting to fall, so we toured the museum onsite and had lunch and browsed the gift and book shops.  We enjoyed a movie that demonstrated the difficulty of sculpting each President's likeness into the granite rock with workers literally hanging off the cliff and ultimately the sculpted faces to do the work.  It even took dynamite precisely positioned and of exacting amounts to blow away layer after layer of stone to achieve the shapes of their faces.  The workers could only work on the project about six months a year because of the weather so progress was slow going.

The man called in to oversee and devise the sculpture process was named Gutzon Borglum.  He had gained fame for doing several works including the sculptured memorial in Georgia near Atlanta called “Stone Mountain.”  Born in Idaho in 1867, Borglum was the son of Danish Mormons. He studied art in Paris before coming home to work along side his artist brother, Solon.  President Coolidge dedicated the memorial in 1927 and Borglum went to work.  Up until his death in 1941 at the age of 74, Borglum along with 400 workers fashioned the heads of the Presidents over 14 years at a cost of nearly $1 million.  His son Lincoln Borglum supervised the final completion of the Memorial after his father's death until work stopped in October 1941.  Today, more than three million visitors from across the country and around the world come to view his work.

The rain came in earnest and we rapidly retreated to our car in the covered parking lot with huge drops hitting our heads, laughing and holding hands down the stairs to reach the dry second level. Ten miles of driving ensued through rain that became quickly became sleet piling up along the road looking like an inch or more of snow.  The accumulating water rushed downhill along the edge of the road carrying the sleet with it and pushing it into piles where ever  there was a break in the edge of the road.  It was as if someone had run down the road in front of us with a bottle of dish detergent creating piles of suds.  We got home after a very slow drive to a talkative Snoopy who was protesting loudly about the weather in his Siamese voice.  September 1st seemed like an unlikely start to the winter season but we felt like it had suddenly arrived.  A nap and two hours later yielded sunny weather under clear blue skies as if the rain had been a dream.