The Badlands ain't so bad.

The original Wall Drug
dinosaur

T-Rex at feeding time.

We began the day with a trip to Wall, South Dakota, to visit the infamous Wall Drug.  This is no ordinary drugstore and it has remade itself into a showcase of food, gifts, jewelry, western clothing, historical photographs, panning and mining equipment, candy, rocks, pharmacy, and 5 cent coffee.  It also boasts an 80 foot Brontosaurus (along the freeway) and a T-Rex who feeds every 12 minutes. No trip to the Badlands is complete without the requisite stop at Wall Drug and so we stopped, shopped and took pictures.

Denna riding a giant
jackalope at the store

The drugstore began in 1931 and its new owners needed something to get people to stop in and shop.  Since the surrounding prairie was a hot and desolate area and the towns' people were dirt poor, they needed a hook.  They began offering free ice water and posting signs for it along the highway. Needless to say, during the depression anything that was free and helped to beat the heat was a welcome stop. The rest of the story is history; they still serve 5000 glasses of ice water on a summer day and the signs advertising it all dot the highways up to 30+ miles away.

Sonny & Kathy

We headed off to the Badlands National Park, which was once a part of a giant salt water sea, and watched the prairie literally drop away into gigantic valleys with sharp edges and strange formations.  It supported a large marshy area after the salt water sea receded and there are fossils of sabre tooth cats, crocodiles, camels, dinosaurs and rhinoceroses.  Today it has a landscape that has very little plant and animal life and is in a constant state of erosion.  Most of the area that is not exposed to erosion is covered in native grasses and today the forest service was burning the grass to stimulate new growth.

Kathy finds some
cypress trees and has to
touch them to see if they're real!

The Badlands earned its name from the Indians (who called it mako sica - bad land) and the French trappers (who called it "bad land to cross") who explored the west in the 1800's.  It's a beautiful area, but we were happy to return to the Black Hills and all its trees!