Days 17-21 Iowa & Badlands National Park

Days 17 - 21

Day 17 - 15 June (323 miles to Pottawattamie, IA)

From Columbia, MO we drove to Hitchcock Nature Center - Pottawattamie, IA

where we stayed in a cabin.

Red-spotted purple butterfly (Limenitis arthemis) outside our cabin

Ironwood  Ostrya virginiana

The nature center had several walkways suitable for wheelchair access

Day 18 - 16 June (190 miles to Palisades State Park, SD)

Heading north from Hitchcock

... and then west into South Dakota. Highway rest areas not only have vending machines, but also Internet access.

Palisades State Park, SD

Day 19 - 17 June (306 miles to Badlands National Park)

As soon as we entered South Dakota we started seeing billboards for Wall Drug . Wall is nearly 300 miles away at this point. By the time anyone gets to Wall they're probably so bored by the flat topography and numbed by the barrage of advertising that they stop [see blog for 19 June].

Today we drove across much of South Dakota on Interstate 90. At Mitchell, we stopped at the Corn Palace.

Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. Once again, the Park Service has done an excellent job of presenting a balanced history, in this case America's response to a perceived nuclear threat in the 1960s.

Badlands National Park, where we have a campsite for the next four nights.

Midge and Smokey at the beginning of the Badlands evening program. Smokey is an improvement on the ear of corn she posed with this morning.

Day 20 - 18 June (60 miles)

A thunder storm and winds last night blew down a few tents. We had to hold up the corners of our tent for about 15 minutes, but the storm passed quickly.

We went for a geology walk with a park naturalist at 8.30AM. This bighorn sheep walked past us a few meters away.

After that we walked to the end of the Door Trail 

and then to the end of the Notch Trail with views South

and North.

This mountain bluebird was singing as we returned to the parking lot.

From Old Northwest Road we took Medicine Root Trail to Saddle Pass and returned on Castle Trail.

Bracted spiderwort

Brown flower heads [of invasive common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) ?] amidst field of bracted spiderwort.

Normally the Badlands are very dry with an average rainfall of 16 inches, but this year there has been an unusual amount of rain. June is usually the wettest month with 3 inches. This May there were 9 inches and they've already had 4 inches since June began. Over part of the track we had to wade through water. Thus, it wasn't too much of a surprise to find a toad on a grassy ridge. Toad Anaxyrus sp., maybe the great plains toad (A. cognatus) or possibly Woodhouse's toad (A. woodhousii).  

Plains pricklypear

Beautiful cracked mud on the track

Western salsify

After dinner we drove along the Badlands Loop Road  

and saw young bighorn sheep near the Pinnacles Entrance.

Day 21 - 19 June (73 miles)

In the morning we went to a talk on the fossils in Badlands NP. A May 2014 Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans hold the creationist belief that God created humanity as it currently exists a mere 10,000 years ago. Many states have tried to prohibit teaching about evolution in schools or have at least tried to mandate equal time for 'creation science.' Fortunately, the National Park Service has no problem with talking about evolution and the fossil record.

Interns work on fossils found in the park and the rangers encourage visitors to report finds by taking a cell phone photo that gives a GPS location.

Midge walked up to Saddle Pass from the west side.

We finally succumbed to the billboards. This afternoon we went to Wall, SD and visited the Wall Drug Store. Ed was there in 1956 with his family when they drove from Boston MA to San Diego CA and remembers it was much the same then.

There may be some drugs somewhere in the store, but it is mostly tourist souvenirs and food.

The cold water is free and coffee really is five cents, but that's where the bargains ended.

Back in the park we had dinner under calm blue skies.

By 9.30PM there was an amazing lightening storm to the west of us. 
An almost continuous display of lightening illuminated the sky and we watched this beauty in awe.

Within 15 minutes of getting into our tent the storm was suddenly swirling around us and soon the wind reached about 50 miles per hour. We stood up to brace the windward side of the tent, occasionally getting knocked over. About 15 minutes into this storm all thought of its beauty vanished, we were getting a bit scared, a tent pole snapped and the fly ripped. After another 30 minutes the wind stopped even more suddenly than it began. Our tent was standing, but only just. We collapsed it and spent the rest of the night in our bed in the minivan. 

Many others in the campground fared worse. A family with a pop-up trailer lost the top and had the contents strewn for hundreds of feet down wind. The next morning people were collecting their torn tents from a wire fence at the edge of the campground and a number of tents were in the dumpster. After searching for 20 minutes we recovered the Crocs [plastic shoes] left in front of the tent the previous night.