Well, the shoelace is still holding. Tim decided there really wasn’t a much better option until we got home, and we still had plenty of shoelace left to retie it together if the first one decided to break. So we forged ahead as planned. We rose early to enjoy the sunrise and packed it all up to hit the Badlands before it got too hot - 93 degrees on the menu for today!!
This place really is called the Badlands because of its extreme temperatures, weather changes, harsh conditions, and just overall difficulty to survive. We were wondering how the name had been coined and it was funny to hear that it really was a simplified expression of the hardships the homesteaders out here faced. I can’t imagine homesteading out here. 3 years of hot and dry misery so you can have your land for $1.25 an acre. Several of the buttes had grass on top of them and we learned that homesteaders would take apart their mowers, drag the pieces to the top of the butte, reassemble them at the top, hay the grass, and slide it down the butte so their animals would have something to eat. Oh. My. Goodness.
You can admire the tenacity of the homesteaders that fought to make a life for themselves out here, but it is tinged with some sadness that it took relocating the Native Americans to reservations to make it happen. The Wounded Knee Massacre also happened in this area and it was a sad tale of the US expansion. A group of Lakota were trying to make it through one of the passes here in the Badlands in the middle of the winter when they were surrounded by a group of US military who were charged with the job of rounding up Natives and taking them to the reservation. They demanded their weapons first, and the Lakota handed out a few, hoping to appease the soldiers. The soldiers, sure this was not all of their gun-power, proceeded to search their campground. A young Lakota, upset but the intrusion, began what was referred to as the Ghost Dance. From what I can tell, the Ghost Dance was an attempt to rally the Lakota to fight back. The soldiers grew nervous and edgy and a deaf Lakota who was armed and didn’t know what was going on, accidentally let off his gun. The nervous soldiers opened fire, gunning down almost 300 Lakota men, women and children. The dead were then buried in a mass grave in the area. Tim’s grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, and his father was raised on a reservation. I know that the position the US put the natives in to assimilate to the white culture was unfair and destroyed their indigenous culture. It’s sad to see what progress and misunderstanding can do.
Prairie dog town was fun - hundreds of prairie dog burrows everywhere. I think we got my favorite photo of the trip here.
Micah attempted to chase an antelope and I was thankful there weren’t any park rangers around to slap us with a fine for harassing the wildlife. And thankfully he didn’t get skewered. We considered again the option of a roadside drop-off. A few more pull offs and points of interest and we attempted a bit of hiking into the Badlands. By 11am we were roasted and toasted. It was obvious no one was interested in sweltering in the desert any longer and we decided that it could be enjoyed just fine from the air-conditioned van. Onto the Visitor’s center for the Junior Ranger badges, Abbey’s penny, my mug and Tim’s bumper sticker. We all have our little collections at each stop. Everyone gets into picking out the item that will remind us of our travels.
I have a love/hate relationship with the Junior Ranger program. On the one hand, it’s a really sweet little program where the kids earn these very nice little wooden badges to bookmark their travels. On the other hand, in order to earn them, they have to complete these little workbooks. There is nothing more irritating to me than to have my kids’ heads buried in a worksheet instead of enjoying the amazing geography we were experiencing. We try to keep it to the car rides and if we have a second morning at a park, we’ll take it back to the camper to do at night. But these short stops, like the Badlands, we’re trying to squeeze it into a few hours of the park. And it depends on the ranger who “swears you in” (yes, they have a little pledge ceremony for each badge) whether or not it matters how much of the book you finish. We’ve had rangers all the way from the guy who was correcting my kid’s grammar and punctuation (seriously???) to the girl who was obviously completely jaded by the program and practically flung the badges in their faces while she muttered dryly and possibly sarcastically, “Congratulations, you are now our newest Junior Rangers.” I wondered if she too saw the irony of requiring worksheets in the middle of natural wonders.
We headed over to a new spot for all of us. I spotted Minuteman Missile National Monument on the Badlands map, 8 minutes outside the park and we decided to check it out. I’m glad we did because it was an extremely interesting peek at the history of the Cold War in the US. We asked the ranger for the Junior books and he handed us the biggest workbooks we had encountered yet - for the smallest area we had visited yet. Good grief. But then he handed me the badges too, “I know people have limited time - you can hand these to the kids when they are ready.” I could have hugged him :)
Did you know that our country had thousands (like way over 450 - because they deactivated “some” of them in the 80s) buried in the grasslands?? I had no idea. There were a dozen stations in this area alone. For 30 years, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 365 days, these missile stations were manned and on alert, ready for any nuclear threat, a missile could be deployed within 30 seconds. We had over 25,000 missiles lying around during the Cold War - always more than Russia, thankfully, because that is the idea. There are significantly less these days but we still hold more than any other country. There was a running tab of each country and the number of their missiles in the museum. Kind of terrifying really. But we still have the most - ready for a nobody-wins kind of war that obliterates human kind. Not a pleasant thought.
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