Road Trip - Needles Highway and Badlands National Park

Our plan for the next two days was to get to Chicago. Lots had people had said to us that there wasn't really much to see on the way... these are the 'fly-over states' apparently. Nonetheless, we found a couple of places explore along the way!

Needles Highway

This was the scenic route out of the Black Hills and it proved far more interesting than the highway! As we drove, we spotted lots of crazy rock formations in the distance - these are the needles!

This is the site originally proposed for the Mount Rushmore monument. However, the granite here was deemed too delicate and unstable to be carved.

Even though this is part of South Dakoto Highway 87, the narrow road, sharp turns and low tunnels mean that this road is almost exclusively used by tourists.

There is plenty of signage and warnings as you approach each tunnel, as well as spaces for you to turn your RV around. Getting stuck is obviously an ongoing issue! Thankfully, our car with the rooftop tent sits at 2.2m tall was not an issue (although it keeps us out of a lot of car parks).

Wall Drug Store

After a couple of hours of driving we pulled off I90 and stopped in Wall, SD. We had seen many Wall Drug Store's signs advertising free water and some looked like they were original signs erected in 1931. We found out later that these signs stretch over 100km from Minnesota to Montana on the I90. The owners of the drug store started offering free ice water to tourists traveling to the newly opened Mount Rushmore 100km away, as a way to boost sales. 88 years later, the drug store attracts 2 million visitors a year to this remote, desert town.

Once we got there, we found the whole main street was basically Wall Drug Store. A cowboy themed art museum, chapel, gift shop, restaurant and drug store, all joined together with wonky staircases and winding hallways between the different shops.

Badlands National Park

Badlands National Park was only a 15 minutes drive from Wall. Once we entered the park, we drove the 40 km r0ad through the park. I think that 40 km took us about 4 hours to drive because we stopped so many times to take photos. The scenery is insane! The rock formations were so alien, we could have been on another planet!

From what we learnt, the landscape is caused by deposition and erosion over millions of years. Now that the land is being eroded faster than sediment is being deposited it is exposing all these layers of rock which were formed millions of years ago (the Pierre Shale at the base of the infographic is 75 million years old). In 500,000 years, the Badlands will be totally gone.

"The layers are composed of tiny grains of sediments such as sand, silt, and clay that have been cemented together into sedimentary rocks...Different environments—sea, tropical land, and open woodland with meandering rivers—caused different sediments to accumulate here at different times. Erosion began in the Badlands about 500,000 years ago when the Cheyenne River captured streams and rivers flowing from the Black Hills into the Badlands region... Modern rivers cut down through the rock layers, carving fantastic shapes into what had once been a flat floodplain. The Badlands erode at the rapid rate of about one inch per year."

We spotted this guy (I think he is pronghorn?) and his friend up on a ridge while we were eating a sandwich in a car park. He stayed up there for a good 30 minutes, we thought he was stuck! Then, he just climbed down the rocks, without any problem. By this stage he had drawn quite a crowd of onlookers.

Apparently there is a lot of wildlife in the park even though the very hot summers, bitterly cold winters, and high winds at any time of year make survival a challenge. Prairie dogs are a keystone species in the park because they excavate extensive tunnel networks that are utilised by other animals for shelter from the elements and protection from predators.

We drove the rest of the way to our overnight stop in Sioux Falls almost without stopping, alternating driver each hour. Sean and I have decided that the key is to switch even if you feel fine! The highways are long, straight and pretty boring, and cruise control is a essential.

The speed limit is 80 miles/hr (approximately 130km/hr) with most people driving faster than that! Our car with the rooftop tent isn't very aerodynamic and driving that fast makes me incredibly nervous - so it's safe to say we weren't trying to keep up.

This photo of our Burmis tent shows the insect road kill when we arrived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota after 700 km of highway driving - yuck!