Our first National Park visit was in South Dakota; The Badlands. It is quite something to come upon after all of the very flat, open farm land. Suddenly you see the peaks and valleys of the Badlands. We can imagine how it got its name when the going suddenly got very rough. Getting across this in a covered wagon would have been difficult.
On the way to the park, we found that there was going to be a ranger talk at the site of one of the Minute Man missile silos which used to pepper the western half of South Dakota, as well as other parts of the middle of the US. Although this one had long since been shutdown, there are still many in use throughout the country. The missile was long gone from this one and they had a glass cover over the silo so you could look in at the mock-up missile. The ranger was very informative since he was once stationed at this very silo so he knew all of the inner workings.
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Then we went on to Badlands National Park. We guess we had not this when we came through here before because there was no entry in our National Parks Passport. It is some quite interesting landscape. It is also interesting in that it is surrounded by flat farm land on all sides. The pictures tell the rest of the story.
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