We had lots of fun in the Custer State Park area, but it was time to move on. Our next adventure had us based out of Badlands National Park for a little over three days.
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The Tuesday morning we left Custer State Park was another drizzly morning, and by the time we reached Rapid City for our Walmart grocery re-stocking run it was full-on pouring rain. Luckily the rain stopped as we were leaving the store, and we drove the rest of the day under overcast but mostly dry skies. Shortly after leaving Rapid City, we starting seeing the roadside signs for the (in)famous Wall Drug store.
In case you're not familiar: Wall Drug is supposedly one of those quintessential roadside places you
have to stop at, largely because of the cute kitschy hand painted (?) signs every few miles telling you about all the great things there (like 5 cent coffee, fresh donuts, western wear, free ice water, jackalopes, 6 foot rabbits, etc.) and generally touting how great of a place it is. Of course, we
had to visit.
The current Wall Drug is more of a "complex" than a single store, and takes up almost an entire city block. The storefront visible from Main Street (pictured above) is actually a cascading series of souvenir/gift shops (they were all joined internally by doorways, so it was unclear whether they were really separate entities or one giant sprawling store with multiple registers) with a cafe/restaurant behind a portion of it (and for those wondering: you really can get coffee for 5 cents - but only if you dine in; the carry out coffee was more expensive). To the right of that was a cute little shopping arcade with what appeared to be "separate" shops - but selling the things from the Wall Drug roadside signs (ex: a western wear shop) so obviously still part of the Wall Drug empire.
Mixed in with the stores, there was (oddly) a small chapel.
The "fun" stuff was in the "Backyard" area.
In the very back was a museum of sorts, with old historic photographs of the Wall area. And of course, more shops and quirky things.
All in all, Wall Drug reminded us very much of the original Nut Tree in Vacaville (back in the old days, before they bulldozed it and built strip malls and "factory stores" in its place).
As we left Wall and continued onward, it became apparent that Wall Drug didn't corner the market on cutesy roadside stops in the area.
We arrived at Badlands National Park a little after 4 p.m. and stopped at the Big Badlands Overlook for our first glimpse of the badlands.
We arrived at the Visitor Center around 4:30 and did a speed reading of all of the displays, since the center closed at 5 pm.
Then we proceeded to the Cedar Pass campground to figure out our puzzling camping reservation. Unlike other campgrounds where you select your site when making your reservation, Cedar Pass doesn't let you pick; we had no idea where our site was going to be. They apparently randomly (?) assign them, and you pick up a card with your assigned site at the (unmanned) entrance station - and then try to find the site by driving down the mislabeled roads that make you think the road to
your assigned site is closed. 🤦 It was also raining again by the time we got settled in, which made grilling for dinner out of the question but provided a nice double-rainbow (which apparently is very hard to photograph with your phone) and interesting dusk/sunset.
The arrangement of the campground itself was somewhat bizarre: unlike most which have parking pads off of the main road for each site, Cedar Pass has the vehicles parallel parked along both sides of the road at their site markers. The picnic table and tent area is on the lawn next to it. And in typical National Park fashion: the showers were pay-showers as well, so it we were in for "navy showers" in the T42 for the duration of our stay.
Our original itinerary had us visiting the nearby Minuteman Missile Historic Sites on Tuesday en route to Badlands, but Christine noticed this posted on the NPS site the week before when she was confirming plans and we decided to postpone our visit by a day instead.
We arrived at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just before 9 a.m. and were pleasantly surprised to find a table outside with a beautifully decorated cake and boxes of the large donuts from Wall Drug as part of the anniversary celebration.
We headed straight to the theater for the virtual tour of the Delta-01 Launch Control Center given by Ranger Jim Boensch, who had been a Missile Combat Crew Commander and Squadron Operations Officer in the '70's through mid-80's. During the tour he gave a lot of context behind the Minuteman Missile program, as well as plenty of first hand anecdotes about what life was like for the crew who took the 12-24 hour shifts down in the underground "capsule" waiting for launch orders (lots of spare time in between the readiness drills, so many of the officers assigned spent their time down there studying and getting advanced degrees).
Afterwards, we watched the orientation movie that usually plays in the theater and then browsed the museum displays.
The museum displays described not only the Minuteman Missile Sites themselves, but the larger history of the nuclear program from the development of the first bomb during WWII, through the Cold War, and eventually the arms limitation and reduction treaties of past few decades that have brought the number of active Minuteman Missiles scattered across the Great Plains down to "only" about 400 now (down from a peak of around 1,000). We found
this display particularly sobering.
On our way out of the Visitor Center, we picked up our cake and donuts. The Wall Drug donuts ended up being surprisingly tasty - looking like an oversized cake donut and iced (with chocolate, maple, or vanilla icing), the outsides had a slight crunch to them and the insides weren't overly dense like cake donuts can be.
We drove 6.5 miles down to the Delta-01 Launch Control Facility. On a normal day, without a tour (which is incredibly difficult to get, since they only allow groups of 6 people into the facility at a time) you'd only be able to get as far as this outer fence.
But because of the anniversary, they were giving open house tours of the "topside" portion of the facility. The ranger at the gate even offered to take one of those rare non-selfie photos for us.
The "topside" is where the support staff slept and worked. The Facility Manager's quarters were by far the nicest.
The Visitor and Security Personnel quarters were much more spartan and more crowded.
When originally constructed, Delta-01 was staffed with only male personnel. Eventually, female personnel were assigned as well and they needed to add a women's bathroom. Can you tell which is which? 🤣
The kitchen, dining room, and lounge were left decorated pretty much as they were when the facility was decommissioned in the mid-90's.
This sign was posted over the telephone. We're not sure whether it was more amusing that someone stationed at a Minuteman Missile facility didn't know how to spell the word "minutes", or that they thought it was a better idea to paste a scrap of paper over the typo instead of just reprinting the sign.
Our "last stop" was the Security Control Center, through which all security activity would have been coordinated back in the day. Note that it has a full view of the front gate and helipad, although back in the day they often chose to have helicopters land outside the gate and went outside to offload cargo, etc. because it involved less paperwork that way.
This map shows all the Minuteman Missile fields, with decommissioned ones in black and active ones in red.
From the SCC we could see the elevator and ladder shaft that led down to the Launch Control Center "capsule" below, but we weren't allowed down there.
This poster in the parking lot shows what we missed, though.
We then drove another 12 miles down the road to the Delta-09 Missile Silo, one of ten that was originally controlled from the Delta-01 LCC. The missile there has been replaced with a deactivated training missile, and the launch door is ajar and an aluminum and glass viewing enclosure has been placed over the opening so that you can see into the silo.
One of the the things we found particularly interesting while listening to the cell phone audio tour is that the little triangular shaped thing on the right in the photo below is a ultra-high frequency antenna for Operation Looking Glass. There is apparently an aircraft in the air over the Great Plains 24/7 that is capable of launching the Minuteman Missiles (ostensibly in case the ground-based LCCs are disabled), so apparently those poor guys doing the 12-24 hour shifts underground don't actually need to be there since there's a redundant way to launch the missiles if needed anyway.
By the time we were done at Delta-09 it was a little past noon so we decided to mosey back over to the Visitor Center to see if there were any donuts or cake left over. The gal outside was more than happy to see us, and encouraged us to take a donut on the way in and on the way out too. Not really being big dessert people, we left with enough donuts and cake to last us for several days. 😋
We were already beginning to feel a little blah from excessive sweets consumption and the rain was forecast to have stopped for the day, so after lunch we decided to return to the Park and head over to the parking lot of the Door Trail and Window Trail trailheads and do a little hiking, starting with the Door Trail. The folks naming things in the Badlands have quite an imagination, because we walked through the "door" without realizing it and spent the rest of our hike looking for something that was actually door-like.
The scenery on the other side was like something from another planet, though.
We felt this opening in the rocks was more door-like, but is much farther out than most folks probably chose to venture.
Hiking along the wall between the Door and Window Trailheads, there were a number of openings you could climb up and look over/through into otherwise hidden canyons.
The Window Trailhead led to a similarly disappointingly shaped opening in the wall; we're guessing the difference between a "door" and a "window" is that you can't walk through the latter (well you
could, but as they used to say in the Looney Tunes "watch out for that first step - it's a doozie!").
This cute little guy was hiding out under the boardwalk on the way, though, which made the trip out worthwhile.
After dinner, we went in search of a good place to watch the sunset and ended up at Big Foot Pass Overlook.
Then it was back to camp and bed, since we had plans to try to catch the sunrise somewhere the next morning...
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