Big Day!

I'll let the pictures do most of the talking this time.

From Murdo, SD, to the Badlands, to Wall Drug, to Mt. Rushmore, to Crazy Horse, to Deadwood.

There isn't a word in the English language for the experience of seeing the Badlands. Awesome is so inadequate. They are another planet. They seem to go on forever. We took about 160 pictures and if I posted them all, it would be nothing compared to what's really there. In the Badlands, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce managed to elude something like 10,000 mounted soldiers searching for him and the remaining young, old, women, and children of his tribe for a very long time in their attempt to escape to Canada.

We even saw and photographed some young bighorn sheep, which was a rare opportunity.

Then we went to Wall Drug, a famous collection of tourist stores near Rapid City and on the way to Mt. Rushmore ... a stop that should be on everyone's bucket list, especially since the impossibly grand plan of the Crazy Horse sculpture is basically around the bend. (Okay, so it's maybe a dozen miles away - that's around the bend out there.) It is so huge that I've lost track of the comparison to Mt. Rushmore, but the sculpture, which is really the reshaping of an entire mountain, is supposed to show Chief Crazy Horse on his mount, and just the head of the mount is to be bigger than the entire Mt. Rushmore carving. But it's a long, long way from being finished, as our picture will show.

We are spending the night in Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickok was famously shot and killed in a bar while playing cards. He's buried here. We're going to visit his grave tomorrow.

Also, Kevin Costner owns a restaurant here, which we plan to have breakfast at later this morning.

The last thing for this post?

We took a back way to Deadwood through the mountains of the Black Hills National Forest.

That's where we saw the full grown bighorn rams right next to the road. One of them was eating maybe ten feet off the road. We stopped beside him. He stood there chewing and eyeballing us. Mike took his picture. He didn't flinch, but I was ready to punch the accelator if he made a move towards us. I'm sure he would have made a mess of the side of our car with his huge battering horns. He was too close to truly avoid, but we might have restricted the damage to avoid damage to the door had he charged.

What a lucky break it was for us to see them in the wild!