Hawkeye Point

In case you can't read the sign on the tank, this is the highest point in Iowa: elevation 1670 feet.

The picture on the right shows the view from the heights, looking down on the surrounding corn fields. I have more pictures of the badlands but I think we can all use a break.

Saturday reflections

Something very different: windows on the main street in Deadwood, South Dakota.

Recreation in Hell

The biggest shock in this unhospitable landscape was that people were actually biking there. Apparently on purpose! For fun!

Apart from the fact that it was over 100 degrees and there is no shelter for many, many miles, I don't know how you could carry enough water to keep yourself alive.

More badlands

Between and beyond the buttes is just more flat prairie, with (if you look very closely) maybe one or two lonely trees to break it up the horizontals and signal a possible source of water.

Landscape contrasts

When you stand on the edge of the canyon in the picture on the left and turn around, you see the prairie on the right.

I don’t give a damn for the same old played out scenes

Badlands, of course. And Badlands National Park in South Dakota yesterday.

It was brutally hot there but it is hard to imagine that this landscape would be welcoming on the mildest spring day. North Dakota and eastern Montana are flat, but the land around these badlands has no hills, no rises, not even a bump. It's almost perfectly two-dimensional. Then the prairie cracks open and falls away into canyons full of rock formations surrounding more empty plains stretching into forever.

Oh, and I also went here today

Where the deer and the antelope play

It's not all scenery in the park. We saw a big herd of bison, lots of prairie dogs, and several of these pronghorns.

Custer State Park

More of the odd and beautiful rock formations along the road in the park.

Cathedral Spires

These are the most famous—and spectacular—of the granite rock formations in the beautiful Custer State Park in western South Dakota.

Unknown soldier memorial

A closer look at the memorial. (The bright sun and shadows from the trees made it hard to read the inscriptions.)

Garryowen

Someone at the trading post recommended that we come here since we couldn't visit the park. This is a few miles down the highway from Last Stand Hill, and was the location of Sitting Bull's camp before the battle.

Wikipedia tells me that the town is privately owned, and has a population of 2 (which may explain why the GPS got so confused when we were trying to find it.) There's a small museum, and a tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which may (or may not—there is apparently some doubt about this) contain the skeleton of a cavalry soldier found in 1926 when an irrigation ditch just outside of Garryowen was being repaired.

Garryowen started as a railroad station on the Little Bighorn River, where supplies for the local forts and homesteads could be delivered. The name referred to an Irish song that was the marching song for the 7th Cavalry Regiment.