Hello! I’m on the moon!
The moon, otherwise known as Badlands National Park, is incredible. I woke up at the crack of dawn to avoid the ninety-degree heat of midday, and hit the trails early. This particular snapshot is from the cratered surroundings of the Door trail, where eroded mini-canyons pockmark the landscape. For reference, the bottom layer is waist-high, and the furthest visible outcroppings are thirty feet away. You could spend days exploring only a square mile here.
I would have spent far more than two and a half hours in the badlands, but I’m already fairly burnt, and staying outside would have been medically irresponsible. So instead I retreated indoors to the overwhelming Wall Drug, located in the town of Wall. I had seen at least sixty-six billboards for the place during the forty-mile drive from Rapid City. What is Wall Drug? Well. It’s like a department store crossed with a mall, covered with kitschy Wild West flavor, advertising five-cent coffee and free ice water, with animatronic jug bands and a splash pad out back, taking up an entire city block, sporting its own chapel, filled with people browsing for hats and cowboy boots and jewelry and local artwork and snowglobes and Wall Drug sweatshirts and hot beef sandwiches and those souvenir rock bags. Somewhere in here, there’s a drugstore as well.
Wall Drug seems to be famous because it’s famous—the Kim Kardashian of shopping centers. It frequently rides the line between inane and insane, but you can find quiet corners to rest and relax. It’s been a welcome place to read and plan tomorrow’s early-morning excursion into the badlands. I picked up a topographic map and a compass just to be safe. I’m planning on a 7-10 morning jaunt and attending a ranger program or two, if I can ever find my way out of Wall Drug.
Your moon shot at Badlands National Park is great! What fun to explore it. Jeff and I went out of our way to go to a place in Idaho to see what was called Craters of the Moon, but all it was was lava fields, which we had seen elsewhere and which looked nothing like anything resembling the moon. But you found it at Badlands! We also ended up at Wall Drug after encountering many billboards along the way. Had to stop just out of curiosity. I was not impressed; it was such a tourist trap. But we did find batteries for my camera (very expensive ). And in the town we found a good Irish Pub lunch. Great pictures of your findings, as usual. I hope you enjoy your early morning hike today in the badlands (and I hope you were able to find your way out of Wall Drug!). Love, Grandma
Glad you’re taking your own route to “discover America.” There are places out there, especially out west and up north, that are just unlike anyplace else on earth. Wait ’til you get to Juneau, Alaska (someday)! Half of Juneau got built during the Gold Rush of the 1880s and the other half got built in the oil boom of the 1960s and 70s. So it’s possible to walk through Juneau like you’d walk through a time machine — back and forth from the 19th Century to the 20th Century on a block-by-block basis. It’s WEIRD — so is Wall Drug… and who needs psychedelics when you’re exploring a place so weird?!?