Day 75: Interior, SD

Stop 45: Interior, SD

145 miles today to this tiny town on the edge of Badlands National Park. Most of today's trip was under heavy clouds, though you'd never know it from any of these pictures. I think that the weather is finally turning summerlike again. I haven't mentioned it but,the last couple of days, we've actually seen high temperatures that were the lowest for the date in recorded history (they broke into the 60's but barely). We've been using the heater at night. By the end of today's trip, it was sunny and the temperature was close to 90.

Badlands National Park is surrounded by the Buffalo Gap National Grassland (who knew that we had national grasslands?).This is a tiny bit of it.

To get to our park, we had to pass through the National Park. The pullouts are a little difficult with a trailer so we got settled in and then returned to the park sans trailer.

Badlands made us think of what Bryce Canyon might look like without the color and after another thousand years of erosion. Here's a few pictures.

Our RV park is on the White River which is marked by the trees in the distance.

On our way in, we'd noticed a place that had a prairie dog village, so we had to return to see it. Here's one popping up in the parking lot in front of Kristen.

We'd also passed by a sod house so we stopped to have a look.

Here's our home for he night. We're right next to the White River but we really can't get near it (too much brush). From what we've seen, there's very little water and what there is, really is white. All of the soil here is white so it makes complete sense that the river runs with white silt. There are indications that, at times, the river is quite a bit larger,

One other thing that I wanted to mention is the cicadas. This has been the year of the cicadas and we've heard them in many places. They are the loudest here of any place that we've been. We're surprised to even find cicadas in South Dakota.

-J-