Out West 2014: Black Hills, South Dakota

Keystone is a tourist hell-hole. It's where intellectually engaged tourists go to die and be reincarnated as Indian taco-eating, chainsaw sculpture-buying, "boardwalk"-walking, hokey tourist trap-visiting tourists.

It also has motel vacancies at reasonable prices during the heavy tourist season, however, and it's conveniently located near all the Black Hills sites that you want to see, so that's where we stayed for two freakin' nights. Blurgh.

I wanted to see Mount Rushmore lit at night, which they do during the summer, so we had the day free here on purpose to visit the paleontology museum of our choice. Our options were the Mammoth Site (mammoth and other remains still preserved in large part in situ), the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (huge collection, research-oriented), and the Museum @ Black Hills Institute (run by the guys behind the Sue controversy). Of the three, although the Museum @ Black Hills Institute is the smallest, we'd never seen a paleontology museum that wasn't run by an educational institute, and Matt and I were gossipily interested in seeing the place behind the people behind Sue, so we went there.

In retrospect, the Museum of Geology would have been a better choice, but the Museum @ Black Hills was still really interesting--imagine several lifetimes' worth of major fossil finds and casts, priceless both monetarily and to scholarly interest... set up all pell-mell in an old auditorium.

It was disorienting and overwhelming, with little flow or organization or contextual layout, so your response wants to be like that of a kid in a candy store, a lot of "OOH, look at that!" and then darting over to "Wow! Look over there!" and back over again to "Oh, check THAT out!"

It was interesting to see a collection that, although I'm sure it's carefully curated (I heard that there's an exponential amount of specimens in storage compared to what's on display), doesn't *look* as neatly and professionally curated, and therefore as sanitized, as a museum's collection always is. Many fossils are still partly encased in their field jackets, which, yes, looks really cool, but also cuts way down on the prep hours for each fossil:

It's a great choice, really, because it lets you see the muddle that a fossil often is found in. Check out the disorder in this skull:

It's overwhelming, though. How can you possibly look at all of this? You can't even SEE much of it!

Nevertheless, of course, we managed to spend a very happy time browsing and exclaiming and finding our favorites of all sorts of things:

Swag related to the Sue controversy!

Although I thought that Meteor Crater was too expensive, I do love that everywhere we go, we find fragments of that meteor displayed, and we have the context for them.

Edmontosaurus skeleton! This complete cast was compiled from bones from multiple skeletons.

One aspect of this particular museum that I really liked was that its information, when presented, was not written for the lowest common denominator. Here is information that someone who already has some knowledge of paleontology will still find really interesting!

anatomy of a T. rex skull

dinosaurs local to this area

After the museum, we tooled around the Black Hills for a few hours--Will and I wanted to visit a rock shop, so we did (I bought a big piece of petrified wood that I'm going to figure out how to polish, Will bought a big piece of obsidian, and Syd bought a set of rocks that will spark if you strike them together in a dark place), Matt and I wanted to visit a winery, so we did (this is why I may have drunk half a bottle of wine every night for the next week), and I wanted to check out the progress on the Crazy Horse sculpture, so we did:

We came home to drink wine, let the kids swim in the motel swimming pool, and pack them a dinner to take with us to Mount Rushmore that evening. 

I may have also taken a nap. Yay, wine!

Out West 2014: Wall Drug

Obviously, you've got to stop at Wall Drug.

Well, perhaps if your parents never took YOU out west when you were a kid, you can squeak by with not stopping at Wall Drug, but if your parents took you out west, they obviously took you to Wall Drug and snapped a photo of you on the jackalope, so you've got to stop at Wall Drug with your own kids.

And snap photos of them on the jackalope:

Even the bathroom graffiti is jackalope-themed!

And yourselves, too, of course!

I solicited a kind stranger to take this photo of us. I had to remind her what an eyepiece and lens are after she held my camera out in front of her, then frowned at it and hollered over to me, "It's not showing the picture! Is it on?"

Wall Drug is technically the kind of giant, indoor shopping mall that I abhor (Go ahead, ask me how many souvenirs I bought on this trip!), but fortunately... okay, here's another story--

I sort of remember the layout of the Wall Drug Backyard, where all the cool stuff is, from my childhood (it's one of those random, nearly useless pieces of information that combine with every theme song that I've ever heard to bully out all the important knowledge in my brain), so I direct Matt to park in a nearly vacant parking lot just across the street from the entrance to the backyard, and then I start walking us back there.

But Matt doesn't want to go this way, because he says that the front door is in the other direction and there's no way to get right to the backyard, because they want you to weave your way through all the stuff to buy first, and he doesn't want to have to walk all the way around the building just to have to go in the front door because we're all tired--we've just come from the Badlands, you know.

Now, here's my secret that Matt has never figured out, but I'm telling YOU, because I like you: If you and I are ever on the verge of a disagreement, and then I all of a sudden just cave without a fight and agree to do it your way, you'd better change your tune immediately and do it my way after all, because the only, only time that I will not fight you to the death when I think that I'm right (it's my most adorable personality trait) is when I know for a fact that I won't have to, because I am about to be proven right, and it's even more fun to be proven right when I have not just been spending the past twenty minutes going on like a douchebag about how I'm right. 

So Matt starts to argue that I'm wrong and the door's the other way, and I mildly say, "Okay, we can go your way," and follow him, and like a lamb to the slaughter he leads the way, naively pleased that he's finally won an argument with me this year. In we go through the front door, weave through all the stuff to buy first, and find our way out to the backyard, just to see that at the entrance to the backyard there's an alley, and that alley leads out to the street. You can basically see our car from there. 

Therefore, AS I WAS SAYING, there's fortunately a way to go straight to the backyard so that you don't have to walk through a bunch of stuff for sale.

There are photos to take of the kids with the same stuff that someone took photos of you with when you were a kid:

--and, of course, you've got to have your free ice water--

--but this addition is new to me:

And thank goodness for it! After a long, hot day hiking in the Badlands, and another couple of hours in the car before we reach the touristy hellhole that is Keystone, South Dakota, a refreshing romp in the water is just what we all needed. 

Ooh, and the kids going on and on and on about how much shorter the walk back to the car was than the walk into the Wall Drug Backyard didn't hurt, either (at least to me!).

Out West 2014: Badlands National Park

We didn't stop after our dinosaur dig! After a tearful goodbye to my edmontosaurus tibia, another dinner of pizza rolls (seriously, three pounds! With all that digging and hiking!), and a final night in Faith, we drove southwest to spend a day at Badlands National Park:

Yes, in about half of my photos that take place in national parks or monuments, you'll see the kids clutching workbooks--they're Junior Ranger books, and the kids LOVED them!

The Junior Ranger books are basically mini unit studies of each national park, encouraging active exploration of the place (usually through scavenger hunts or BINGO games), deeper immersion into some specific aspect (through the requirement to view a film or attend a ranger program), and cross-curricular research and study (the books cover varying subjects, but often history, culture, geology, biology, creative writing, etc.).

When a kid completes her Junior Ranger book, she goes back to any ranger in any of the visitor centers and turns the book in, goes over her work with that ranger and discusses it (and usually, in the case of Will, has a giant conversation about it), and is then awarded an official Junior Ranger badge to wear on her shirt, and is administered the official Junior Ranger oath.

Thrilling, right? And oh, the kids took this so seriously, and were so thrilled to earn each badge. And my favorite part (other than how into it the kids were) is that the rangers clearly took the project equally seriously. Several times we had rangers approach the children in the various national parks as they were working on a specific activity and converse with them about it--like CONVERSE converse, not just quiz them or "help" them. The rangers who went over the children's completed workbooks with them always also engaged the kids in conversation about them; they'd ask the kid to walk through the process of coming to a particular conclusion, correct erroneous information and explain the answer, ask them about their favorite activities or the most interesting things they'd learned, etc. I actually kind of sweated it a couple of times, listening to these conversations--reminded me of my PhD oral exams that I failed!

And you have not seen cute until you've seen my kids' earnest little faces as they repeat, right hands raised, their Junior Ranger oaths. They always put on their badges immediately, of course (Will liked to wear ALL of hers, for days), and when wearing their badges, they were invariably greeted by rangers with "Hello, Junior Ranger!"

Truly, this program just made the park experience for the kids.

And so, Junior Ranger books in two hands, we spent the day walking around the Badlands and climbing on stuff:

There are fossils to discover here, too, particularly some interesting fossils in the evolution of the horse. If you discover a fossil eroding out of the rock, you're to take a photo of it with something standard in the frame (coin, bill, house key, etc.), record its GPS coordinates with your smartphone, then fill out a form about it back in the visitor center. We didn't find any fossils, but we certainly kept a lookout!

Whenever Matt takes my camera, he always snaps cute photos of me--


--but he also takes sneaky photos like these:

That kid and I can't see each other, but clearly we're related!

And here I am on a different hike, once again sunning myself on a rock. Like a lizard.

We spent most of our day at the bottoms of these hills and cliffs and peaks, clambering up and then sliding back down, but toward the end of the day, noses pointed ever westward, our journey through the park took us to an area where we were looking down across vast vistas of Badlands:

Narrow walkway between two huge drops? Gallop across it, of course!

Or, you know, scramble over to the edge of it, sigh.

I love myself some sedimentary layers!

After exploring all this natural beauty all day, hiking and eating sandwiches and climbing on stuff, we settled ourselves back in the car for a drive to what may be the tackiest place in the West.

Stay tuned for Wall Drug!