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Needle Hwy spires
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Location: Custer State Park & Badlands NP.
When: two days at end of May
Miles traveled: 445.3
Price of gas: 3.35
Interest:
High point: Sticker scavenger hunt!
Low point: Large white night moths (also in NE) that come inside my car when the door is open and hide between the door and the frame.
One thing learned: Sylvia Lake is the most beautiful part of Needles Hwy.
Environment: Black Hills NF, pine trees and rocky mts everywhere. Driving on hwy 90 has hills with grasslands, but no trees.
Driving from Nebraska to Montana, I stopped again in South Dakota. I was here to drive the Needles highway and, on my mother's urging, visit Badlands NP. I also visited Wall Drug store because it's apparently a big thing.
The Needles highway is in Custer State Park (Car day pass is required, can buy one at park entrance.) and passes between Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore. The highway is open seasonally and closes after the first snow fall. There are a few hiking trails off of the highway, but I did not traverse any of them. If I remember correctly, the day I drove up from Nebraska is also the day I drove through Needles hwy, so I had limited amount of time and was probably a bit tired. All the rock formations are neat, forming tall narrow spires. But Sylvia Lake on the West end is gorgeous. The lake was formed in 1881 after a dam was built. A hotel was also built a few years later. Sylvia Lake is so much more that the rest of Needles hwy because it combines the rock spires, Black Hills Forest greenery, and a relaxing blue lake together. I sat awhile at the lake and sketched the rock formations above the dam while people fly fished and fish tantalizingly jumped in other parts of the lake.
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Needles Eye tunnel
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Sylvia Lake
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Badlands National Park is not as colorful as Painted Desert in Arizona, but it still has some gems. Yellow Mounds overlook and Cedar Pass campground are two colorful places. Mounds of yellow with a thin layer of red dirt look beautiful on a thick carpet of green plants. If I had made time to go hiking, it would have been in this area. Cedar Pass campground is at the bottom of the canyons, providing a different view with nice evening shadows. A thunderstorm approached the campground the night I stayed there. Most of the rain did not hit us and the thunder and lightening never arrived. The photograph of lightening is a still shot from a video I took of the storm. The thought that stuck with me about the Badlands is that the colors and rock layers, while visible in many places, is also present beneath one's feet, out of sight underground waiting to be uncovered.
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Wall Drug is a block long building with many mini western stores and a chapel inside. They sell books, boots, clothes, food, art, fudge, toys, prescription medication, and a lot more (but no fruit smoothies). There is also a lot of photograph opportunities with statues inside the building and larger ones in it's "backyard" area. It's a nice place for a pit stop.
On my way out of South Dakota, at a visitor's center, I discovered the state has a sticker scavenger hunt! This little hunt for free stickers gave me a jolt of excitement and interest that had been lost somewhere in the stuff of traveling and seeing more/new places. Unfortunately, many stickers were in locations I had already visited and was not returning to, places south of Rapid City and near the Badlands. Ultimately I collected three stickers from Rapid City, Box Elder, and Sundance. In Sundance, I was told that Wyoming also has a sticker scavenger hunt across the state. I picked up that map and visited those places that were along my drive route to Montana. The sticker promotion of various state towns is a very new program, and I don't know how long it will be promoted and maintained. It's probably not likely that it will be ongoing in that future time when I revisit South Dakota on another vacation. Darn.
South Dakota has a lot to see and explore and is welcoming to tourists. It would be nice to explore the areas more thoroughly and slowly in the future.
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At Wall Drug
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