More from South Dakota

I had a great time in Badlands National Park!  For someone from the East Coast, if feels like I was walking on the moon through the buttes and pinnacles of clay and volcanic stone.  Many of these deposits, up to 38 million years old, used to be underwater and they're currently eroding at about one inch per year.  I think the photo above does a good job of really capturing how the South Dakota prairie just falls into these canyons.  The name Badlands originally came from French fur trappers in the early 1800s.  They called the area, les mauvaises terres a traverser - bad lands to cross.

Watercolor Sketch of Spearfish Falls in the Northern Black Hills.

The Black Hills are located in western South Dakota just west of Rapid City.  They're a geographic anomaly and are in no way connected to the Rocky Mountains.  The hills rise thousands of feet above the plain and include such famous monuments as Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial (still in progress).  To stay cool (another 100 degree day out here) I opted to go into the northern Black Hills to Spearfish for a scenic drive through sharp craggy pine filled hills.  The waterfall you see above is about 100 feet tall; the mist added some needed humidity to the dry air.

Buffalo herd in Custer State Park.

On the advice of one of my colleagues, Victor, at work, I took a bus tour of the Black Hills with the Fort Hayes Chuckwagon Tours company.  This proved to be a great investment because I could have someone else drive me around for a change.  The nine hour tour visited all the historic sites of the area like Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial, and they also visited some of the state parks, including Custer State Park which has it's own Buffalo herd!  As it turns out the Custer herd is the "seed group" for many other buffalo across the country.  The animals didn't pay us much attention as we paused on our trip.  Recall, the buffalo or more properly called bison were hunted to near extinction by white settlers as they moved west.  Today there continues to be efforts made to restore and reintroduce herds in the west.

I'm sure we call can think of some people who should visit this.

The Black Hills is as you can imagine, a tourist and vacation destination, and I just had to pull over and take a picture of this billboard while driving through. (No I didn't go, although I'm sure some of you may be wondering if this would have been a great stop over for me!)