Badlands National Park, Mount Rushmore, Wind Cave National Park, Devils Tower 24/05/2019 to 27/05/2019

Places visited: Badlands National Park, Mount Rushmore, Wind Cave National Park, Devils Tower
Date: 24/05/2019 to 27/05/2019
Persons: Harshal, Juilee, Radhika.

This time again, weather was sever at Cleveland and New York, so we had to drop the plans for Cuyahoga National Park and Niagara. So while browsing the National Park Services' website I came across Badlands and Wind Cave park information. As this area was about to have comparatively mild weather than the midwest, we decided to go here at the last moment.




24/05/2019
Juilee returned from office at 2:30 PM and then we loaded the bags in the car. Parathe were already packed by me for our dinner. We picked Radhika from school and then we headed towards I80 west. Juilee was driving. Me and Radhika were enjoying at the back seat. We missed an exit at Cedar Rapids, so we had to go through Des Moines and Omaha (Otherwise it would have been 30-60 minutes lesser time). We filled the petrol in between. I me ate the Parathe at 7:00 PM. I did some R&D and using booking.com I booked "Arrowwood Resort at cedar shore" which is near the city of Chamberlain in South Dakota. After 8:00 PM, I took over the driving part while Juilee had her dinner in the back seat along with Radhika. On the Iowa part of I80, the speed limit goes till 75 mph, but as you enter South Dakota, it becomes 80 mph. The roads are quite straight, long and least traffic. I hardly saw more than 4 cars on the road till the end of the sky-line. There were huge fields on both sides of the highway and not many homes. The hotel is just after we cross the bridge on the banks of
Missouri river. We drove for couple of minutes after the bridge along the shore and we reached the hotel at around 1:00 AM. I asked if there is a room on ground floor and it was available. So we hit the room. Radhika was already sleeping. The room was at the Swimming Pool. I saw it and exclaimed and then Radhika also woke up to see the nice view. Somehow we managed to make her go back to bed again.

25/05/2019
In the morning we woke up and then enjoyed the breakfast at the restaurant which is across the river banks. We then enjoyed a short walk on the banks. People were renting the motarboats to enjoy the boating. This is a big difference in India and USA. In USA you can rent the boat/kayak/canoe, but you have to drive it by yourself. In India, you get the driver by default with a boat. So we could not rent a boat here as we did not know how to drive it. So we just enjoyed the view and checked out from the hotel.
We headed for the Badlands National Park.
It was 11:00 AM, as we entered the badlands area, and we saw a helicopter taking off. It was just 2 minutes before the entrance gate. We stopped and enquired for a ride. We then booked the cheapest ride which was of 6 minutes duration for $49 per person. The person who billed us, asked us to wait for the helicopter to come back. After 5 minutes of wait, we were boarded on the helicopter. This was my first helicopter ride. I sat in the front and Juilee, Radhika at the back. The ride went over the main area of badlands and the views were beautiful.

The Lakota (a Native American tribe) gave this land its name, “Mako Sica,” meaning “land bad.” Located in southwestern South Dakota, Badlands National Park consists of 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest protected mixed grass prairie in the United States. It is desolation at its truest, where you can look for miles and see no sign of civilization.

This land has been so ruthlessly ravaged by wind and water that it has become picturesque. The Badlands are a wonderland of bizarre, colorful spires and pinnacles, massive buttes and deep gorges. Erosion of the Badlands reveals sedimentary layers of different colors: purple and yellow (shale), tan and gray (sand and gravel), red and orange (iron oxides) and white (volcanic ash).

Badlands National Park also preserves the world’s greatest fossil beds of animals from the Oligocene

Epoch of the Age of Mammals. The skeletons of ancient camels, three-toed horses, saber-toothed cats and giant rhinoceros-like creatures are among the many fossilized species found here. All fossils, rocks, plants and animals are protected and must remain where you find them. Prehistoric bones are still being uncovered today by park officials.

At the entrance of the park, we bought the "America the Beautiful" pass for $80 which is an annual pass and valid at most of the Federal Recreational sites and National Parks in USA.

We took the very first short trail and saw the beauty of badlands. The mountains (smaller than grand canyon) are kind of layered rocks with different colors like brown, pink, gray. The rocks are porous and soft. This is the only trail, where you can carry strollers due to paved path. Other trails are not good for strollers. On the next trail, we could actual climb on one of the small mountains. Radhika enjoyed this small little hike. All these trails have good parking area and are on the same one road (SD240 scenic road), so you cannot get lost. The next stop we took at the visitors center for restrooms. After the visitors center, we stopped at

the Cedar Pass lodge to get the hot water for preparing the tea. We took the tea and stopped at one more trail (I think Castle Trail). We sat there on a bench just to enjoy the silence and watch the wonderful creation of the mother nature. We did not walked here as we were exhausted. As we started to exit the park, we saw one more short trail, were we stopped just to have a last darshan of bad lands. We sat there for a while and then started our onward journey.

I booked an hotel again from booking.com.

On the way to the hotel, we visited to Mount Rushmore. It is the famous national monument. Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered around a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount

Rushmore in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture's design and oversaw the project's execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son Lincoln Borglum.[2][3] The sculpture features the 60-foot (18 m) heads of Presidents George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).[4] The four presidents were chosen, respectively, to represent the birth, the growth, the development, and the preservation of the United States. You can walk the Presidential Trail (0.6 miles long, 422 stairs, weather permitting) to get up close and personal with the mountain sculpture and perhaps glimpse some of the area wildlife. We did not do that. We parked our car on 6th level (which is closes to the mountain, otherwise, you have to take the elevator to go to this level if you park on 1 to 5). We just took the photos and went to the hotel.

The hotel Bavarian Inn was excellent. The room was spacious with microwave. We had our ready to eat Chole (which I bought from Costco) and went to bed. Before going to bed we did some R&D on cave tours for Wind Cave National Park as well as Jewel Cave National Monument. But they do not have online tickets for the basic tours. For advanced tours, there are online bookings but you can not take kids on those tours. So we decided to wake up early and then go to Wind Cave to get the tickets before the queue gets longer in the noon. Usually there is a small queue in morning and late evening.



26/05/2019
We woke up early at 7:00 AM and then without spending time on bath, we just brushed the teeth, emptied the stomach and I had ready to eat breakfast of Pohe. Juilee and Radhika took the hotel's breakfast. The breakfast was excellent.
We checked out and then took a very scenic road 385 from the hotel to Wind Cave National Park. The road is hilly goes from Black Hills area and with full of tall pine trees. The weather was wonderful. We reached to the park at around 9 AM. We entered the visitors center and thankfully the tickets for 9:30 AM cave trip were available. So we bought it. The park has limited food and beverage vending services in the visitor center. Nearest grocery or restaurant services are available in the nearby towns of Custer and Hot Springs. A picnic area 1/4 mile north of the visitor center offers easy access to the visitor center and the start of cave tours. There are many guided tours you can do:
Garden of Eden Tour - Easy: Ideal for those with limited time or abilities.
Natural Entrance Tour - Moderate: The most popular tour and great for families.
Fairgrounds Tour - Strenuous: Widest array of features and most stairs of any tour.
Candlelight Tour - Strenuous: Includes some off-trail travel. Minimum age is 8 years old.
Wild Cave Tour - Very Strenuous: Crawling required. Minimum age is 16 (with signed parent permission).

But as we were with a kid, we booked the Natural Entrance Tour. The tour started from a hut downstairs. The tour guided was excited and cracking jokes. She was so big, that I could not think of her walking so much. But she beat my thoughts. She first took us to the mouth of the cave and then she showed us how the cave breaths in and out. At that time, the cave was breathing out. Sometimes it breaths in.
We were group of 30 people. We entered the cave after walking on some chemical (which helps to stop spreading of white nose syndrome in bats). Inside the cave, she was leading the people and she also chose one person among us to be trailing the people. She informed us not to touch the walls and not to disturb the bats if any. We could see just one bat in the cave. We walked down for like 300 stairs. It was a walk of 2 miles but not much strenuous. There were electric lights on the path.Wind Cave's famous boxwork is abundant throughout this trip. Boxwork is made of thin blades of calcite that project from cave walls and ceilings, forming a honeycomb pattern. The fins intersect one another at various angles, forming "boxes" on all cave surfaces
Alvin McDonald was one of the first systematic explorers of Wind Cave. He crawled through Wind Cave's cramped passageways, writing his discoveries in a journal. He explored the cave from 1890 to 1893. Our tour guide told us some interesting stories about him. She also showed us a place from where some amount of boxwork is stolen. The boxwork is precious. It takes millions of years to form a boxwork, so she was sad that someone took it out.
As we went to the last room of this tour, our tour guide switched off the lights to let us experience the silence and how the early cave explorers feel when there was no electricity. It was all dark and we could not hear anything apart from our breaths. After few minutes, our eyes got habitual to the darkness and we started seeing very little part of the floor and room, but that's it. I would never become a cave explorer.
We came up by an elevator.
After this, we started our journey to the Devils Tower. This place was all over in my mind since I read about it and saw photos of it. So we decided to visit it quickly before starting our return journey (Later we thought that we would been saved from the storm if we would have skipped this place).

On the road we saw a family of bison. We reached near to the Devils Tower at around 2:30 PM. We first parked our car at Devil's Tower Gulch Restaurant and had some lunch. Most of the customers were like cowboy styled people. I think the people over there never saw Asian Indian people, so some people were staring at us. The service was too slow (or I sensed racial discrimination). Devils Tower is in Wyoming state. From this hotel's backyard, we could get some nice photos.

Gazing up at the Tower, you see only one side at a time. Driving from the park entrance to the visitor center offers you views of the different sides. The Tower Trail and other hikes offer changing views of the Tower. Even approaching the Tower from the highway, one is offered varying viewpoints. The myriad faces of the Tower offer us many perspectives of the geologic formation. To truly see the Tower, one must observe it from all perspectives.

To understand the place called Devils Tower also requires many perspectives. Ancient peoples have lived around the Tower for thousands of years; their modern descendants still maintain a connection with this place on a physical and a spiritual level. Oral histories passed down by various American Indian tribes, as well as their present-day ceremonies, offer us important perspectives of the Tower.

I liked the story which goes like this....The Crow, called the Apsáalooke in their own Siouan language, or variants including the Absaroka, are Native Americans, who in historical times lived in the Yellowstone River valley, which extends from present-day Wyoming, through Montana and into North Dakota, where it joins the Missouri River. Once when some Crows were camped at "Bear's House," two little girls were playing around some big rocks there. There were lots of bears living around the big rock, and one big bear, seeing the girls alone, was going to eat them. The big bear was just about to catch the girls when they saw him. The girls were scared and the only place they could get was on top of the rocks around which they had been playing.The girls climbed the rock but still the bear could catch them. The Great Spirit, seeing the bear was about to catch the girls, caused the rock to grow up out of the ground. The bear kept trying to jump to the top of the rock but he just scratched the rock and fell down on the ground. The claw marks are on the rock now. The rock kept growing until it was so high that the bear could not get the girls. The two girls are still on top of the rock.

We then parked our car at Devils Tower parking area. We decided not to spend more than 20 minutes here. So we walked at the base of the tower for 5 minutes and took some photos. We saw that some people are going farther on the trail. So we started walking on that trail and enjoyed the natural

beauty. We almost forgot about the time and we came to know that we walked for 30 minutes and we have covered a half way till the back of the tower. The weather was good. We could hear the leaves rattling due to the high winds. There were couple of climbers climbing on the wall of the tower. You need to get permission from nps to climb on this tower. We were on the Tower Trail and we took rest on some points. After the half way we were able to touch the base of the tower and felt amazing. We were able to complete the trail in like 1.5 hours. We did get some amazing views of the tower. The tower sometimes looks gray, sometimes green and sometimes black. Nature is amazing, right?

Jewel Cave National Monument is another cave system near to Mount Rushmore. Due to lack of time, we did not visit it this time. If you visit Wind Cave, then I think you can skip Jewel cave due to the same category (i.e. cave), so that your kids will not get bored of watching caves all the time (unless you are passionate about caves).

We then started the return journey. Juilee started driving. On the way, we stopped on some Exit at Ramada hotel used their microwave oven to heat the ready-to-eat bhaji and then started the journey again. I booked Arrowwood Resort at cedar shore again online as Radhika really wanted to visit it once again. We saw amazing two rainbows at a time due to clouds, rains and sun. After some time Radhika slept. It was like 9 PM when it started raining heavily. Suddenly it was all black and thunders started. I was quite ok at the back seat, but Juilee started shouting and crying while she was driving. She was all afraid of those giant thunders spreading from one end to the other end of the sky. Also the road became of one-lane due to construction. It was a combined effect of one-lane + huge thunders + big rain drops that Juilee was terrified. We somehow controlled the car by driving it slow. Fortunately we found a rest area within next 5 minutes. We parked just in front of the door of that rest area and then ran inside. Radhika was in deep sleep till then. As we entered the rest area she woke up and got surprised. Till then Juilee was calmed down.

We were in the rest area for almost an hour. Few people were coming in and then going out but no one stayed there. We wished them safe drive. We were surprised to see that people were ready to drive in that thunder storm. The thunders were running from one end to the other in the sky. It looked pretty scary. (Later I thought that I should have asked Juilee to stop by the shoulder of the road and I should have taken over the driving, instead of letting her drive for those 5 minutes).

At 12:00 in the night, it seemed that the rain has slowed down, so we decided to restart the journey towards the Chamberlain. But, the worst was not over. It again started pouring like hell. There were small hails as well, I felt. The road was completely dark. There were big rain drops falling on the wind shield. And then there was so much of lightening. I felt like I was driving in a tunnel. (I swear I will never do this again. It's better to stop at the rest area or some kind of shelter. As it was dark, I did not know if it's a thunderstorm or a cyclone. The mistake we did was, we checked the weather of Chamberlain, but we did not check the weather of the cities in between Wyoming and Chamberlain).

It was 1:00 AM and due to the slow speed, it was about to take another hour and a half to reach to Chamberlain. So I tried to book another hotel from booking.com and it got booked, but then I found that it is off highway in a distant village. So we dropped that plan and continued to Chamberlain. Somehow I was able to manage to drive in this scary situation (which I would never do again) and we reached to the Arrowwood resort at 2:30 AM. The weather at Chamberlain was fine. It seemed like it rained there few hours back. The guy at the reception told us that the storm passed from this city few hours back. We got a room on second floor this time and we had not time to enjoy. We just slept till 8:00 AM next morning.

27/05/2019
We woke up and had the breakfast at the room. We were not in the mood to enjoy those nice views of Arrowwwood resort. We convinced Radhika that we will come back soon here and then we started the return journey. Weather was still cloudy but at least we had some day light, so after some time Juilee took over the driving part. This day we did not get tired. We reached to home at around 9:00 PM.

This was one of the most memorable trip of our life. We saw some very beautiful places and we experienced some very scary storm.

Lessons learnt: Never drive in stormy weather at night. You would never know what's there in the sky. Always check the weather across the way and not just the destination.

Details:
Arrowwood Resort at cedar shore: https://arrowwoodcedarshore.com/
Bavarian Inn: http://www.bavarianinnsd.com/
Badlands National Park: https://www.nps.gov/badl/index.htm
Mount Rushmore: https://www.nps.gov/moru/index.htm
Wind Cave National Park: https://www.nps.gov/wica/index.htm
Devils Tower: https://www.nps.gov/deto/index.htm

Expenses:
Lodging = $362
Helicopter Ride = $147
America the Beautiful Annual Pass = $80