Black Hills/Badlands

The Black Hills exceeded our expectations .. with the variety of the topography, the ruggedness of the granite peaks, and the openess of the prairies and meadows. We also had a chance to take tours at Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument.

Our worst image .. a tour bus dropping off their "load" to take pictures and stop traffic. This was on the road to Mount Rushmore and they are walking up the tunnel to take a picture of the presidents which are framed as one drives out of the tunnel on the opposite side. I wanted to run them down but Cindy didn't want me to pay for the damage to the Mecedes.

There are 5 tunnels, obviously one lane ... all blasted out with dynamite through the granite. They all look similar to this.

Love the roads through with views around every turn. Unusual rock formations everywhere. Amazing the ponderosa pines can grow through the area.

This tunnel is on The Needles Highway ... and this is the "eye of the needle". How appropriate. We missed the tour bus here .. what a shame.

While in the Black Hills we also did two cave tours. The first was Wind Cave which was fairly easy except for bouncing my head off a few low hanging rocks. The other was Jewel Cave which was very interesting because of the calcite formations which were everywhere. It was like walking through a giant geode. Both caves continue to be explored and each have almost 150 miles of discovered passages .. the 3rd and 5th longest caves in the world.

From The Black Hills we headed to Badlands National Park. This is a very different area but we were surprised by how many tourists are still prowling around.

The Badlands are really bad news if you're trying to negotiate your way through the maze. Actually beautiful in a stark kind of way. Basically soft soil being eroded by water.

Views from the upper prairie looking down on the "lower prairie". Lots of prairie dogs and buffalo on the grasslands.

A prescribed burn on the prairie grass. They manage this because it's part of the natural way of adding new nutrients to the ground and reducing the "clumping" of the grasses.

We also went through the Minuteman complex north of Badlands National Park .. a holdover from the Cold War in the 1960's through the 1970's. Over a 1,000 of these were stationed out on the northern prairies and each carried a 1.2 megaton hydrogen bomb (equal to 60% of all the bombs dropped in WWII). Later they could launch 3 warheads from one missile. It sure brought back some memories

So tomorrow we leave to head south through western Nebraska and western Kansas and into Texas where we'll spend a couple of days at Palo Duro Canyon before going on down to Lubbock to visit friends and go to the Texas Tech/UT game on Saturday night.