I looked forward to South Dakota because of Mt. Rushmore. But I didn't have any idea of the other places it had in store for us. This is a really cool state.

When I think of South Dakota, the first thing that comes to mind is The Badlands. The area around Medora, North Dakota that I wrote about in that state's report are Badlands too, which I learned are any rock formations exposed to the ravages of weather and time and changed as a result of those. But the South Dakota Badlands are the most famous.

The North Dakota Badlands should probably be called Beautylands. The South Dakota Badlands are just plain spooky. You expect to see rattlesnakes everytime you turn around. Actually there are a lot of rattlesnakes there, but we didn't see any out in the wild.

Badlands National Park is just miles and miles of odd, unusual, really weird rock formations. There are a lot of trails through the Badlands and Collier and I couldn't wait to climb them. These are different than most mountains since there aren't hardly any plants on the rocks. These are just kind of like mountains of really hard mud. My mom was nervous the whole time Collier and I were climbing because we were really high. Once she decided to be brave and videotape us. Collier and I started running down the hill and he fell down the mountain on his face. We were really scared, but he just got a scrape on his stomach. My mom didn't want us to go back up, but Collier cried to climb. He didn't care that he fell down. He loves to climb and cries a lot of times when we go past mountains and won't stop to let him climb. Sometimes we get tired of that.

Of course we had to see Mt. Rushmore. That's in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The faces carved on the mountain are Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It was really neat to actually see Mt. Rushmore after seeing so many pictures of it.

In this area of South Dakota we saw hundreds of hundreds of bikers. Every year there's a get-together for Harley Davidson bike riders in the town of Sturgis. One year there were a half million bikes in this tiny town. And during that week there are bikes all over South Dakota. We saw them in the Badlands and Mt. Rushmore, even in the capital city of Pierre. On one highway, I counted more than one hundred motorcycles driving by us in about fifteen minutes.

We also saw the Crazy Horse Memorial. It's a sculpture still being made of Chief Crazy Horse. It was started by a man way back in the 1940s. He's dead now, but his relatives are still working on the statue. All you can really see is the Indian Chief's face. The horse and the rest of the statue look like chalk marks on the side of the mountain. When it's done which could be many, many years from now, maybe when I'm old, it will be so big that all the President heads at Mt. Rushmore could fit inside Crazy Horse's head.

Another neat area of South Dakota is Lead and Deadwood. These were areas where Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and a lot of those Wild West people live and died. Wild Bill was killed in a saloon in Deadwood. We visited there and my dad got to act in the skit about Wild Bill's last day. We even went to Mt. Moriah cemetery where he and Calamity are buried. The only thing I didn't like about Deadwood was all the gambling places.

Lead is a big gold mining area and there is still a big gold mine there. We went to the town and looked down in the mine even though it was closed. It was huge!

Spearfish is another nearby town. It's famous for the Passion Play about the last seven days in the life of Jesus. We looked at the big outdoor stage. People come from all over the world to see the play.

Something really cool was the Wind Cave in Wind Cave National Park. The tours were over when we got there, but before the Visitor Center closed we got to walk up to the cave and we could hear the wind! It as kind of spooky. Scientists learned that when the barometer falls, the wind rushes out. When it rises, wind rushed back in. But can you imagine what the guy who discovered it in 1881 must have thought! I would have been afraid to find out what all that strange noise coming from the ground was all about.

My brother loves dinosaurs so we had to go to Hot Springs. The Mammoth Site there is so cool you can hardly believe it. A man who was going to build some apartments on some ground found a bunch of mammoth bones when the bulldozers were working. It turned out to be a spring where mammoths would go to drink and then fell in and couldn't get back out. Their bones are still in the spot where they died. Now there's a building built over the place and scientists from National Geographic and other places come to help dig the bones out. Actually they just kind of brush the dirt aside and leave most of the bones in the spots where they were found. It is so neat.

Of course, we visited the capital city of Pierre because we visit all the capitals. When we got there, the governor wasn't in. He was in Rapid City and we were just there! The people in his office felt bad and gave us some governor souvenirs and his picture with his signature. I was sad I didn't get to meet him.

The capitol building is very cute. It's not really big. It has a black dome and inside a grand white staircase to each floor. It is all white inside. They also have on the first floor small dolls wearing replicas of the dresses the first ladies wore for the inaugurations.

Oh when we were in The Badlands and went to Pierre we left our port-a-potty behind. It was still brand-new so my mom wanted to get it. So we drove back through the Badlands and then decided to go to Wounded Knee. There was a big massacre of Indians here a long time ago. It was a sad story. It was interesting to see the Indian reservation.

South Dakota is just so full of unusual places to see. I really liked this state a lot.

Return to Courtney's Journal and State Facts

Return to the USA Trip Home Page

Mail to: Marlene Graham | Craig Graham | Courtney Graham