Day Thirteen

Clear, beautiful morning in Chadron, unlike when we arrived last night.  A crew from Texas Tech was here last night, researching outflow.  Apparently this season has been a terrible year for Plains tornadoes (unlike other parts of the country).  We’re beginning our whirlwind (so to speak) tour of the South Dakota parks (Crazy Horse, Rushmore, Minuteman, Badlands), so we’re heading north on US385 (again).

We stopped at a local branch of a large corporation to get lunch before the trip to save some time (you can probably figure out which one, they have many such branches in rural areas).  I am wearing my Gallifrey Road shirt (the one with the four Doctors walking out of the TARDIS at the zebra crossing, like Abbey Road), and one of their employees caught sight of me and said, ‘Great shirt!’  His coworkers said that he has a warped sense of humor, to which I replied that I do too.  They wondered if we were related.  I had to come all the way to Chadron, Nebraska for someone to get it. 

Speaking of, a TARDIS would certainly take the guesswork (and skill, I guess) out of all this stormchasing business.  Being able to get anywhere in the universe at any point in time would make things easier.

While I was typing this we quietly invaded South Dakota again.  If you include the states we started from and traveled through (the liberal definition), we’ve been in 10 states: in rough order: New York, Georgia, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, and Kansas.  I anticipate that we’ll get to Wyoming (yay) today or tomorrow.  Over 20% of the U.S. ‘covered’ in two weeks—wow.

Drove up US385 through Hot Springs (a very nice looking town) to the Crazy Horse Memorial.  The site used to take freewill donations, but now they charge $10 a head (we got by with $3.50 per as students).  Stayed long enough to take pictures of the ‘progress’ (it’s been a work in progress since 1948).  For some reason they’re not too hot on taking government subsidies.  Sad, as they’ve made so little progress to this point.  It will be pretty spectacular when (if) it’s done.

Mt. Rushmore was beautiful, but smaller than one would expect.  Gorgeous, nevertheless (see pics).

To prove we’re really just tourists, we stopped in Wall (and of course, Wall Drug).  It’s everything you expect it to be, but the sheer magnitude is jaw-dropping.  It was a very quick stop (~15 minutes), so we didn’t see a whole lot of it.  Still interesting, though—kind of like the Smithsonian, you can’t see it all in one day.  Maybe you can, but it would be a very long day.  I can honestly say that my life is better for having stopped here.  And yes, there is still a drug store here.

From Wall Drug we visited the site of an old Minuteman missile silo (Delta-09).  Very interesting—it was an unmanned silo, the control room was about 15 miles down the road.  You can visit this site as well, but you need reservations.  That would have been really cool to see.

Next stop was Badlands National Park.  All I can say is wow.  I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, but this was pretty spectacular.  Pictures are worth more than 1000 words in this case.  There were some storms going on in the distance as well, so there are pictures of those too.

In the Badlands gift shop they were selling the little Golden weather book, much like the one I had as a kid.  The cover is different, but the content hasn’t changed since the early 1970s (old radar and satellite references, observations in SA instead of METAR format, etc.).  Almost touching, really.

We ran into a minor issue regarding our lodging for the evening.  We were planning to drive back to Chadron, making our way to Estes Park on Tuesday to see Rocky Mountain National Park, but the hotel we stayed in last night was booked (whoa).  While driving back toward Rapid City, we expanded our horizons to see if there were rooms in Lusk, Wyoming (no) and Hot Springs, South Dakota (yes).  We figured that if worse came to worse we could stay in Rapid City again (and hope that no one was bitten by anything again).  While trying to figure out what was going on (thanks again, McDonalds), we noticed that to the southwest of town a cell had an interesting feature.  Gus and I decided it was a supercell with a wall cloud!  (There were also some mammatus clouds overhead again.)  We set up the mobile monitoring and decided to give chase.  Sadly, the wall cloud petered out (it never really appeared to rotate).  We determined that a bow echo developing behind the supercell laid down an outflow boundary and the cold air choked off the warm inflow to the supercell.  Another damn bow echo!  The bow did put down some gusty winds and put on one hell of a lightning show (again).

So here we are in Hot Springs, SD.  The town seems to roll up the sidewalks at night, so Gus and I wound up ordering a pizza from the place with the familiar red roof (Authentic Mexican Food).  Unfortunately, he’s back under the weather again.  Fortunately, this schedule is coming to an end soon. 

Overall, though, what a great day for pictures.  It’s funny that on a day we weren’t intending to chase we come the closest to actually seeing a tornado.  (More pics to come.)