RealImaginaryWest Day 5 – The Good & Badlands of South Dakota

We drove through drizzly conditions from De Smet to Mitchell in Eastern South Dakota, and then traversed most of the state on I-90 to Badlands National Park and Wall.

Last Stop with Laura

So, after another violent Great Plains storm (albeit in much more secure conditions) and our car already packed, we emerged from our covered wagon to much cooler but drizzly weather. The misty haze was not looking good for my photographic aspirations today! The forecast showed the rain holding on for just a little longer in De Smet, and that there would be a general clearing trend where the sun might come out and burn off the fog.  Becky and I each got showers this morning, since it would have more long-lasting effects than if we’d showered the night before with the 85-90 degree heat and humidity. The humidity in South Dakota was nowhere near as high as what we had experienced before we left Ohio, but it was enough to make you move a lot slower so you didn’t overexert yourself in the heat.  Now that the temperature had dropped to 65-70 degrees, everything except the haze was peachy.

We got a fairly early start, getting out of the Ingalls Homestead around 8am. We headed into De Smet and to the local coffee shop, Ward’s Store.  Interestingly enough, this was the site of Charles Ingalls’ store, and in the original building that rose in its place after he sold it and moved out to his homestead.  Becky was really glad to have gotten coffee here, since now she’s been to every place where Laura lived in De Smet.

We then continued south on SD-25, making our way down to Mitchell, which is only about an hour away. We planned to see the famous Corn Palace, and I hoped to score a quick breakfast.  Ever since we’d left De Smet, it had been horribly foggy, drizzly, and hazy.  The rain had let up completely by the time we’d reached Mitchell, but the fog lingered.

The World’s Only Corn Palace

A look south down Main Street in Downtown Mitchell

We got breakfast at a hip restaurant called Cafe Teresa. The place seemed to be loaded with college students, who I’m assuming were from Dakota Wesleyan University. It was easy to overhear bits of conversations about finals, classes, and professors. Becky and I both ordered eggs and toast, which hit the spot..and so off we went to see the Corn Palace.

The Corn Palace wasn’t quite itself on the day we visited… This made us sad. 🙁

It was still way cool to see the corn murals though! 😀

The Corn Palace is the main tourist draw in Mitchell, which has about 15,000 residents and a rather quaint and decidedly Western downtown. The building is decorated on its exterior by thousands or maybe millions of ears of corn, color coordinated to depict western scenes of cowboys, buffalo, stagecoaches, and Indians on the front and sides of the building. Unfortunately, it took us a bit to make sure we had actually found it because it looked much less flamboyant than the pictures we’d seen. Apparently they were in the process of replacing the domes on top and had run into a delay because the new domes weren’t strong enough to hold up to South Dakota’s wind (which Becky and I have noticed is quite substantial).  Also, it appeared that they were updating parts of the building’s exterior, which they do every year anyway because it’s probably a good idea to slap a fresh coat of corn on the building to keep it from peeling.

So it’s that kind of palace!

Becky and I proceeded inside “The World’s Only Corn Palace”, hoping for a more satiating indoor experience. There were lots of exhibits inside about corn, the history of the Corn Palace (reaching way back into the 1890s), and then there were doors…turns out through the doors you could see that the Corn Palace had a lot in common with San Francisco’s Cow Palace and the Detroit Area’s Palace of Auburn Hills—for it was a small basketball arena where a giant souvenir and gift shop had been set up.  I didn’t figure it for an opera house, but I have to admit that without having done any research that in the back of my mind when I saw the general shape and size of the building, I wondered if in fact this was a basketball arena.

It seemed like a very nice place to see a game. It was likely that it hosted games for either the Dakota Wesleyan University or the local high schools.  But either way, the clock was ticking and we had to move on to Badlands National Park, which was about 3 hours away on I-90.

You GOTTA SEE South Dakota!



A VERY small sample of the gimmicky advertising…I regret that I did not capture more of these sorts of things!

I’d like to take this opportunity to recognize South Dakota for a couple of things. First, Mitchell was my first indication that South Dakota really was a great place to analyze advertising gimmicks, because between what we saw here and what we saw later that day in Wall, it was readily apparent that South Dakota took the art of a tourist trap to a refined art form!  There were signs and buildings and old trucks and cars and dinosaurs in front of billboards all along the interstate that really were sights in their own right and really made it tempting to stop a lot along the freeway and check this stuff out.

No, your eyes do not deceive—the speed limit really is 80mph!

Second, the speed limits in South Dakota often seemed to actually make sense!  In Minnesota and most other states, you drove 55mph, maybe 60 if you were lucky in remote two-lane state highways—we hit the SD state line, and voila—65mph!  When we first got on I-90 in Mitchell, we had to check our eyes at first—”Speed Limit 80″—AWESOME! So thank you, South Dakota, for admitting that you might as well be able to drive fast on the roads here because there are so very few cars, the visibility is great, and it takes so very long to reach someplace.

Another reflection I have to make about South Dakota is that I didn’t expect it to have so many trees—in fact, I didn’t expect it to have any at all without at least a creek nearby, since it is in the Great Plains—and the Great Plains is a great big huge prairie that just doesn’t have the rainfall to really grow trees.  Apparently the main reason why there are so many trees is because of the Homestead Act, which allowed you to earn your 160 acres of land through growing enough trees on your claim…and probably because people who aren’t used to vast open grasslands prefer to have lots of trees to break up the scenery (and did we mention wind?). Personally, I’m all about diversity and history, so I was excited at the prospect of seeing a land that was just covered with prairie and all the things that come with it!  I also think a giant prairie sounds awesome for just grazing cattle, which we saw a lot of actually. Black Angus cows were everywhere, and lots of pieces of property up in the northern part of the state had lakes and sloughs where the cows often congregated to play in the water and drink as well as graze.  As we pushed farther west from Mitchell, we started to see a lot more of the open prairie I expected and we got to see fewer trees if any at all.

The Great Plains Are Not Flat

One big misnomer about the Great Plains is that it is all flat. That may be true in places like Illinois or Kansas, but it is most definitely not the case in Minnesota or South Dakota where rolling hills are pretty much the rule.

There are even deep valleys, especially along I-90, with the biggest valley being the Missouri River, which runs right through the state. It was unfortunately extremely foggy when we crossed it, but it was still a site to behold!  It seriously was more like crossing an expansive lake than crossing a river, and was actually much much bigger in person!  If they had called it part of the Mississippi instead of naming it a whole other river, the Missouri-Mississippi River would be among the longest in the world, and from what we saw, it had enough water to prove it!

Crossing the Missouri River on I-90. Sorry for how hard it is to see anything, but it was actually so foggy that we could see even less in person! I cranked the Dehaze on Adobe Lightroom up to +75 for this one (no joke)!

Crossing the Missouri was significant for another reason too—prairie dogs—of which we had seen none so far along the entire prairie we had crossed. I asked someone about that in De Smet, and was told that all the prairie dogs were located on the other side of the Missouri River.  The locals here hate them, because as this gentleman said, prairie dogs with their burrowing “just destroy the land”.  We were still looking forward to seeing some though, as they are an animal unique to the American West.

Another feature I noticed were steep escarpments to the south along the freeway, and sometimes there would be giant protruding chunks of land in the middle of the prairie. We were pushing closer to the Badlands, and so it seemed there were small little badlands appearing more frequently in the distance to our south along the freeway.

When we got on I-90, I told Becky to let me know if she wanted me to drive, since we’re about to get on a long stretch of mostly straight freeway where highway hypnosis can set in. About an hour or so away from Badlands, Becky said she was starting to have trouble, so I had her pull off a few exits down the road so I could finish my last blog entry.  It was my first taste of legally zipping along at 80mph, on a freeway in the middle of the open prairie.

Who knew crap like this would be in such demand?

We were just a few miles away from our exit for Badlands National Park on I-90 where we pulled off the freeway at a scenic overlook. As we headed up the hill to take in the view of the expansive prairie all around us and the Badlands in the distance to the Southwest, two people seemed engrossed in some sort of spectacle taking place on the ground.  When we got close enough, you could see two little pieces of poop rolling up the hill being pushed by little dung beetles who were happy to have scored dinner!

Overlooking I-90 from the scenic overlook at Buffalo Gap National Grassland, just a few miles east of the exit for Badlands National Park

Entering Badlands National Park

So many peaks…each unique…

Unlike many national parks, you can go off-trail and climb on the rocks…so your photo-op creativity is really only limited by your command of gravity!

We pressed on into Badlands National Park, a place where neither of us had ever been, and our first national park of the trip.  On the map it looked as if you got off the freeway and BOOM there’s the Badlands. Reality however, was that it was still nearly ten miles until we reached the park entrance.  Since we planned on visiting four national parks with entrance fees on this trip alone, we ended up purchasing an annual pass for $80. The total for entering each of these with just an individual park pass would be $105, so I recommend the annual pass if you plan a trip like this, at it saves you a substantial amount of money!

Entering the Badlands was like entering another world!  You’re on the prairie and then there are sharp layered outcroppings of rock that look like teeth made of mud sticking straight out of the ground.  Some were as tall as a person, and some were hundreds of feet high, while plenty of others were in between. Cedar Pass was positively awesome, where the road descends at least a couple hundred feet down an escarpment that revealed how big these Badlands really were when you could see them from the south.  It was almost like going down a great big step over a monster’s bottom teeth and into its mouth.

Overlooking the lodge and visitor center from Cedar Pass

Continue reading RealImaginaryWest Day 5 – The Good & Badlands of South Dakota

RealImaginaryWest Day 4 – Connecting with Laura at the Ingalls Homestead

Our first day off the road! We visited Ingalls family historical sites and museums around De Smet, South Dakota and took time to relax and recover after the storm that drove us from our tent the night before.

A carriage traverses the Ingalls Homestead

Waking Up in De Smet

After getting practically no sleep the night before, we began our day at about sunrise by driving into De Smet and getting breakfast at the Oxbow Restaurant. There was no use hanging around the Ingalls Homestead anyway, since they didn’t open until 9am that day. They would hardly have even known we were there, save for a couple of bundles of firewood missing, since we had pitched our tent well after closing time and pulled it out only two or three hours later. The weather had calmed down, with partly cloudy skies and gorgeous shades of greens and yellows from the early sunlight on the terrain around us. The wind was still blowing hard and gusty, but it was all that was left besides a few puddles after the last night’s storm.

With what little of my brain was left, I checked the forecast—partly cloudy, 90 degrees for a high, and windy all day with severe storms likely in the evening with possible large hail. Uhm, yeah…we’re not doing the tent thing! NO WAY. Large hail was all we needed to know.

So at the Oxbow, it was great to sit in something that was not a car, and it was just awesome to get a nice hot breakfast with eggs, French toast, and bacon. Becky and I deliberated over whether we should get one of the covered wagons they have at the Ingalls Homestead that night, or whether we should get a motel.

At breakfast we met all sorts of locals, mostly farmers in the De Smet area. One older man said to another as he walked in, “How did you like the sound of MUSIC, last night!” I quickly concluded he was talking about the horrendous storm and had to laugh out loud! He loved the storm for watering his crops, while I hated the storm for wrecking my sleep and nearly wrecking my tent. It was also quite telling that he found pure enjoyment—apparently that isn’t even close to a bad storm for the Plains!

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Homes

After breakfast, we trekked back to the Ingalls Homestead and paid for our firewood and the night of not tent camping in the maelstrom. We also bought admission to the exhibits and activities there that demonstrate what Laura wrote about in her books. We planned to first go into town to tour the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Homes museum first, and then return to see the Homestead.

On the museum grounds there are four buildings: the main store, the old schoolhouse that Laura and her sisters attended, the small schoolhouse where Laura taught at the age of 15, and the railroad surveyors shanty that the family lived in when they first moved to De Smet. Becky was most excited to see the house Charles Ingalls built, which was across town from the museum itself. I’d love to share more photos, but photography inside the buildings is prohibited.

One remarkable difference with De Smet is that the Ingalls practically lived in the lap of luxury here! The surveyors shanty was originally located on Silver Lake, on the east edge of town, and even it had a huge kitchen with a sizable pantry, a bedroom, a living area, and a huge loft where the girls slept. It beat the pants off the dugout in Walnut Grove and would have been a lot easier place to spend the winters than the log cabin in Pepin. Charles Ingalls got a coup with this railroad job! The family was delivered from the grasshopper-ravaged farm at Walnut Grove and wound up in an even better position in a town that seemed much prettier.

Charles Ingalls built a 10′ x 14′ shanty in 1880, which he doubled in size the following year. This replica at the Ingalls Homestead also includes the 16′ x 20′ addition he added to hold the pump organ he and Laura bought for Mary.

Now while Charles Ingalls worked for the railroad, he opened a store at the center of town and also undertook another homestead claim. There he built a shanty for the family that started out as another “little house”, but was doubled and then nearly doubled again in size—to add a room big enough to entertain and to hold an organ. You see back in Walnut Grove, Laura’s older sister, Mary, at the age of 14 had contracted a fever that caused encephalitis, nearly killing her. This eventually resulted in her losing her eyesight and going away to attend a school for the blind where she would learn to play the organ. While she was away, Charles and Laura saved money to buy an organ for the house as a surprise for Mary’s homecoming. She became the organist at the Congregational Church the Ingalls attended in De Smet.

The Ingalls spent most of six years at the family homestead. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, Charles had to plant at least ten acres of crops for five years, live there for at least 9 months of each year, and build a house to live in, after which he would receive ownership of the 160-acre quarter-section of land he had developed at no charge from the federal government. Another way a homesteader could receive his land was to plant enough trees on the land successfully in that amount of time. Charles showed in his proving papers that he had succeeded at farming 30 acres and that he had also planted 6,000 trees, exceeding all the requirements to receive his homestead.

The Ingalls Home & Museum is the last house Charles Ingalls built and lived in.

As Charles and Caroline’s age advanced and his daughters except Mary got married and moved away, the family built a house in De Smet that would top even the modest shanty on their homestead. It started out small yet again, but Charles kept adding to it and improving it until Caroline had even said that they no longer lived in a little house—now they had a comfortable one. This is the only Ingalls house that still stands just as it was, kept up in its original interior decor. It was positively beautiful and looked like a palace compared to all the places they’d lived in before. All that hard work in unforgiving environments had really paid off for the Ingalls family! The house itself was often how Charles, Caroline, and Mary made their living as they got older, offering room and board to all sorts of people who needed a place to stay. The surviving daughters managed the house for several years after Charles and Caroline’s passing, eventually selling the house after it was in the family for 57 years.

Ingalls Homestead

After visiting the Ingalls homes and schoolhouses in De Smet, we stopped at the cemetery outside of town where the Ingalls family was buried, and then returned to the Ingalls Homestead to tour there.

360-degree panoramas of Ingalls Homestead. Click and drag to look around & click the arrows to see a different location. Click the top right button to go full-screen.

Continue reading RealImaginaryWest Day 4 – Connecting with Laura at the Ingalls Homestead

RealImaginaryWest Day 3 – On the Banks of Plum Creek & Little Tent on the Prairie

A woman wearing a bonnet looks across Plum Creek and up a hill to a sign that marks the location of the Ingalls dugout house.

We crossed the entire state of Minnesota, stopping in Walnut Grove, the settings for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, On the Banks of Plum Creek and the Little House on the Prairie television series. We then drove to the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet, South Dakota.

I thought this would be a short one today, seeing as our only true destination was our next Laura Ingalls stop, Walnut Grove, Minnesota. We hadn’t planned on staying in Walnut Grove, but rather we intended to carry on to DeSmet, South Dakota, our third and final Laura Ingalls stop. We had six hours of driving to be followed by one day and two nights of exploring DeSmet and relaxing! Unfortunately, our first night in South Dakota did not go quite as we planned…which I’ll get to after a few reflections on the last of our time in Pepin, the drive across Minnesota, and our visit to the Laura Ingalls museum there in Walnut Grove.

Packing Up in Picturesque Pepin

It was our first day packing up the tent and the campsite on this trip, plus we got back to the campsite late after sailing Lake Pepin, so I was nervous about getting a jump on the day. So nervous, actually, that I didn’t bother to shoot a pano of our campsite until after we’d packed the whole thing up. Before we left, I wanted to grab a pano of the waterfront at the center of town. Plus, we had been invited by our new friends from the cruise to brunch, so we thought we’d at least take a few minutes to have coffee with them.

360-degree panorama of our campsite at Lake Pepin Campground. Click and drag to look around. Click the top right button to go full-screen.

It was funny, though…when we went to shoot the pano, we saw Maria from our cruise perusing the streets just soaking everything in and enjoying it. And Pepin really was a very special-feeling place…great for Laura Ingalls lovers, art walks, and bumming along the riverfront. It felt like being at the beach, except it was a river instead of an ocean, and it was Wisconsin instead of the East Coast. Maria hung out with us after I shot the pano, as we were looking for Dave to see if we could find a tool I use to blow the dust off of my lens. She, as everyone else but the captain on the cruise, was from Minneapolis, and told of how she worked for many years with the family business in worldwide shipping. Her family was Greek, and she ran much of the company with her brother until recently when she retired and started her own business as a wellness coach. She shared how she was always more laid back than her brother, and that she really enjoys having a much more zen lifestyle than she had with the craziness of running the shipping business. She certainly seemed to be having a wonderful weekend so far, and it was great to see someone enjoying life like she was.

360-degree panorama at First & Main in Pepin, Wisconsin. Click and drag to look around. Click the top right button to go full-screen.

We then went out to our friends’ farm, about two miles out of town. The family was extremely hospitable, and their farmhouse and all their property was beautifully manicured and had a lot of old-fashioned charm. They were a wonderful family to have met, and we really enjoyed their company! They gave us a few suggestions of sights to see in South Dakota and suggested taking in as much of the Mississippi River as we could.

A highway curves around a tree-covered bluff with a rock outcropping on top

Maiden Rock Bluff along the WI-35 west of Pepin

We decided to take their advice and proceeded to take a slightly more northern route along the river west of Pepin. Then we meandered our way across Minnesota, working our way to US-14 at Nicollet. Minnesota was all rolling hills as far as we could see. Eastern Minnesota was forested with a few farms, giving way to fewer trees and almost exclusively farmland with a few small towns here and there as we proceeded west.

A highway curves past a sign that says 'Lamberton' and a very large barn that has 'Lamberton Stockyards' painted in large lettering across the top.

Approaching Lamberton, one of several small farming towns along US-14 in the Southwest Minnesota prairieland

Walnut Grove’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum

Masonry buildings line both sides of a very wide main street in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

Downtown Walnut Grove, two blocks off of US-14 and three blocks around the corner from the museum
Cars are parked in front of a wooden building with letters that say 'Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum'.

Outside the main building & gift shop at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota

Eventually we arrived at Walnut Grove. We may have seen about four cars for the last half of that—I’m not sure if that’s because of lack of population density and tourism, or just because it was July 4th. Either way, roads and streets were extremely quiet, and there were very few people at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, which I’m told was wall-to-wall people just the day before.

Continue reading RealImaginaryWest Day 3 – On the Banks of Plum Creek & Little Tent on the Prairie

RealImaginaryWest Day 2 – Dwarf Mountains, the Great River, and a Little House

A replica of the log cabin Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in as a small child and a historical marker at the Little House Wayside in Pepin, Wisconsin

We drove from Motel 6 in Janesville to Pepin, Wisconsin, a village on the Mississippi River. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, Little House in the Big Woods takes place here, where she lived as a small child seven miles outside of town.

Today we got a much later start than I had hoped, but it seems like everything somehow worked out.

We left the Motel 6 in Janesville (they left the light on for us, but we turned it off before we left) right around 11am and headed north (or west…whatever) on I-90 past Madison and Wisconsin Dells on up to the Mississippi River.

The Driftless Area of Wisconsin

A row of Interstate Highway System shield signs indicating North I-39, West I-90, and West I-94

We were really impressed with the gorgeous rolling hills around Madison and on up through Wisconsin Dells. Everything everywhere was just wonderfully green and lush, and everyplace seemed very well-manicured and maintained, which is wonderful to see. Lots of times you would see modern industrial and commercial buildings, and sure enough, behind it would be a farm—something that is novel for me to see right next to suburban buildings.

Castle Rock as seen from I-90/94

Castle Rock as we passed by on I-90/94

Now once we got further north, the flora seemed to change to having more conifers in the mix and things weren’t quite a lush green anymore—they were more of a California or Rocky Mountain green, but not quite that color. It also got hazier and hazier, and that was likely because smoke was blowing in from forest fires burning all the way up in Canada. What was also strange was that there were huge valleys that would open up, and lots of times you’d even see small mountains that were too small to be considered officially mountains—maybe we could call them “dwarf mountains“. You’d see naked rocks that looked as old as time standing in the middle of a bunch of trees next to the freeway too…something else that I never associated with Wisconsin or Minnesota.

Looking miles away down a hill on I-90 in Wisconsin at Jacksonville Pass

Jacksonville Pass, looking west near the 36-mile marker on I-90 in Wisconsin
Tree-covered King's and Queens Bluff towering above US-61

King’s & Queen’s Bluff from US-61 as it winds along the Mississippi River north of I-90 near Winona, Minnesota.

Eventually we passed LaCrosse and went over the Mississippi River into Minnesota on I-90 and US-61, which parallels the Mississippi. US-61 actually follows the Great River all the way into Minneapolis, and there are busy railroads on both sides of the river carrying trains. Many of the trains heading south are all tanker cars, probably full of North Dakota crude oil bound for refineries in Louisiana. All along the river there were heavily-wooded bluffs with dwarf mountains, knolls, knobs, and rock outcroppings breaking up the trees.

Pepin & Little House in the Big Woods

Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum sign in Pepin, Wisconsin

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Pepin

We crossed back into Wisconsin at Wabasha on MN-60/WI-25 to go to Pepin.  This is where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born and lived as a little girl, and where she got inspiration to write Little House in the Big Woods. They have a museum there, and about 7 miles out of town there’s a replica log cabin. Pepin from WI-35 seems unremarkable in town, with a few little stores you’d see anywhere else, and a little motel with a campground where we stayed. The biggest attraction on the main street was the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. Admission is only $5 and they have plenty of artifacts from the era when Laura and her family lived in Pepin Township, including cook stoves, clothing, tools, a covered wagon, and canoes used to fish on Lake Pepin.

Two children's dolls like those Laura had as a small child. One is a rag doll, and the other is made of a corn cob.

Dolls like Laura’s in Little House in the Big Woods. Her first doll, Susan, couldn’t help that she was a corn cob.

We met Dawn there, along with her mom, Mary, who just retired as the village clerk and was now planning to devote much more time to her position on the board of trustees for the historical society that runs the museum. They just expanded from a small building into two much larger buildings, and were in the midst of reorganizing and remodeling to improve their exhibits. All throughout the museum were artifacts, either with stories behind how they were used by the family, or with quotes from Little House in the Big Woods pointing out where Laura referred to them. There’s a video presentation on the history of Laura’s family in Pepin, along with other history of the area. Mary showed us on a big map from 1877 which lot Charles Ingalls had bought with his brother-in-law near the edge of Pepin Township. She explained how they found the information years ago by putting the word out for property owners to check their title abstracts for Charles Ingalls. She also shared the story of how she and the historical society worked to get grants and raise money for the museum to build a replica log cabin on the site of the old Ingalls farm at a wayside.  (In Wisconsin, small roadside parks along highways that we would call rest areas in Ohio are called “waysides”.)

Overlooking a fence and field with rolled bales, with a silo, several barns, and a farmhouse on the other side

A farm along County Road CC

We followed County Road CC out to the Little House Wayside Cabin, built in 1978 just a few hundred feet from where Charles & Caroline Ingalls started their family. The countryside round about the town was incredible! Beautiful farms and woods were all along the winding highway. We saw several farms that looked like they belonged on postcards.

Continue reading RealImaginaryWest Day 2 – Dwarf Mountains, the Great River, and a Little House