10/15/10 For the past three days we have started traveling, thinking this would be the day we leave South Dakota and begin our eastward journey in earnest. We do, after all, want to be back in Maine by mid November… that’s a month away. We’re still in South Dakota! Oh well, we find ourselves wonderfully content on our very slow eastward trek. We will make it home, ambling in a nomad style.
Tonight we are camped in a South Dakota State Park near the Iowa border, having spent the day driving through big, open, and windy prairie land and flat farmland where crops (corn, millet, and moil) were being harvested. Hugh combines dumped their loads into tractor trailers in the field for transport to bin storage and trains. As we moved from west to east thru the state, the black hills gave way to dry grass land dotted with black beef critters and then slowly transitioned to slightly rolling cropland, mixed fields of green winter wheat and dry golden-brown corn. Now tonight we are camped in a wooded area, green, moist, and delightful. It has been a long time since the land we passed thru was other than dry and Spartan.
Our time spent on the high prairie and deeply carved mesas’ of the Badlands was special. The eroded and water-carved landforms that cut into the prairie captivate the imagination. Walking among knife-edge sharp landforms, looking across the great expanse of prairie, I was taken with a sense of the sacred. Much related to the Wounded Knee tragedy happened in the Badlands. That event punctuated this already sacred area… We were glad to be visiting in October, a time of few tourists. It was possible to stop, walk on the land, sit and listen to the silence, feel the wind and the sun, and be present with the Spirit of the place.
We traveled on the “Loop Road” thru the Badlands. Rounding a corner we were treated to the sight of ‘yellow mounds’, a formation of brilliant yellow clay and rock, weathered to rounded mounds, capped by a stripe of purple and topped by soft gray sandstone. Startling in its simple beauty, it was so unlike any area we had been through. Mother Earth’s color pallet is indeed broad!
I guess tomorrow we will actually leave South Dakota, glad to have spent a week here and ready to find our way thru Iowa, Illinois, and on east.
Tonight we are camped in a South Dakota State Park near the Iowa border, having spent the day driving through big, open, and windy prairie land and flat farmland where crops (corn, millet, and moil) were being harvested. Hugh combines dumped their loads into tractor trailers in the field for transport to bin storage and trains. As we moved from west to east thru the state, the black hills gave way to dry grass land dotted with black beef critters and then slowly transitioned to slightly rolling cropland, mixed fields of green winter wheat and dry golden-brown corn. Now tonight we are camped in a wooded area, green, moist, and delightful. It has been a long time since the land we passed thru was other than dry and Spartan.
Our time spent on the high prairie and deeply carved mesas’ of the Badlands was special. The eroded and water-carved landforms that cut into the prairie captivate the imagination. Walking among knife-edge sharp landforms, looking across the great expanse of prairie, I was taken with a sense of the sacred. Much related to the Wounded Knee tragedy happened in the Badlands. That event punctuated this already sacred area… We were glad to be visiting in October, a time of few tourists. It was possible to stop, walk on the land, sit and listen to the silence, feel the wind and the sun, and be present with the Spirit of the place.
We traveled on the “Loop Road” thru the Badlands. Rounding a corner we were treated to the sight of ‘yellow mounds’, a formation of brilliant yellow clay and rock, weathered to rounded mounds, capped by a stripe of purple and topped by soft gray sandstone. Startling in its simple beauty, it was so unlike any area we had been through. Mother Earth’s color pallet is indeed broad!
I guess tomorrow we will actually leave South Dakota, glad to have spent a week here and ready to find our way thru Iowa, Illinois, and on east.
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