I am writing this as 40-mph wind gusts and rain buffet the camper at our KOA campground in Buffalo, Wyoming. We have spent the past week in South Dakota, and are making our way west toward Oregon. There were long stretches of no civilization whatsoever today, just beautiful vistas of rolling hills dotted with trees and a view of mountains in the far distance. Also wind! Lots of wind.
My favorite campground for the South Dakota stretch of the trip was the Lake Vermillion Recreation Area in Canistota. We are currently camping with our friends Hal & Val, and were able to park next to each other lakeside. It was what I think of as a perfect camping night: cool weather, campfire, glorious sunset, thunderstorm in the distance providing a spectacular light show, and a sampling of Irish whiskeys to go with the s’mores. I wish we could have stayed longer, but we have booked every night for the next two months and had to move on. If all campgrounds were like this, I’d never want to come home!
Dave and I had visited Badlands National Park as a day trip from Hill City in 2018, and we wanted to camp nearby this time so we could have more time there. The Badlands are a semi-arid moonscape, compelling your attention and inviting you to wonder what sorts of creatures could live in such a place. The Lakota called it “mako sica”: bad lands. Somehow bison, bighorn sheep, antelope, and rattlesnakes manage to survive there. We saw a few bighorn sheep at a distance, but we saw no other signs of life aside from tourists.
For activities, we did a couple of the short hikes—the Door and Window trails—and also a Night Sky talk given by a couple of entertaining park rangers. I would have loved to hike more, but the heat got to me, even at 10:30 in the morning. The sun blazes down without mercy, and I felt as baked as the earth. But it was truly an incredible place, and I recommend a visit if you get the chance.
Before we left the Badlands area, we also visited the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. The visitor center exhibit is highly informative and chilling, showing just how high the stakes were during the peak of the Cold War. We toured the visitor center one day and then visited the decommissioned Delta-09 missile silo site on our way out of the area. One Minuteman missile has 1.2 megatons of TNT, 80 times the amount of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
After two nights at the Badlands KOA, we moved on to the American Buffalo Resort in the Black Hills, just outside of Rapid City. We had fond memories of our visit to Custer State Park in 2018, and were eager to visit again. It did not disappoint! Since were were there on the Friday of the July 4th weekend, there were more people there, but it wasn’t overcrowded at all. We began with Iron Mountain Road, which is a winding scenic drive full of switchbacks. One feature of this area is that you can often see Mount Rushmore in the distance, as they cut the trees back. We had decided we would not visit Mount Rushmore again on this trip, so it was fun to get the chance to see it here. (Sorry, I couldn't upload those particular photos.)
Then we moved on to the Wildlife Loop Road, where we saw a huge bison herd on either side of the road. Custer has about 1,400 bison in the park, if I remember correctly. There were many calves among them, which was fun to see. We also answered a question for ourselves: yes, both male and female bison have horns!
We ended our Custer visit with a trip up Needles Highway, which is flanked by huge stone spires. It is slow going, with switchbacks and one-way tunnels, and worth every minute.
On Saturday we went to Rapid City to meet up with our friends Steve and Charlene, who are just beginning their full-time camping adventure. We wandered the cute historic downtown, shopped at a couple of bookstores, and had lunch at a Mexican restaurant.
Then on July 4th, while everyone else was out celebrating, we took a camp day, the first since we had left 12 days earlier. I cleaned the camper and did laundry, wrote some postcards, caught up with emails. Later in the day we met Steve and Charlene in downtown Rapid City again for ice cream. Since they have statues of almost all the former U.S. Presidents on their street corners, we naturally had to pose with our favorite.
That night, we drove to the top of a hill so we could look down over Rapid City and see the fireworks. People love their fireworks here, and you can buy them everywhere, so the whole city was lit up. After that, we had what will probably be our last campfire for the trip, given the drought conditions out west. It was a beautiful way to end our visit.
Thanks for reading! As I experienced on previous camping trips, access to decent WiFi is limited. I am posting this in a Starbucks, and even that is excruciatingly slow. I will post here when I can, but if you want to follow along with my travels, your best bet will be to become my friend on Facebook: Lisa Kinney Colburn. See you online!
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