We woke up this morning to relentless sun. It was pounding down on us by 7 a.m. We checked in at the national park visitors center for Junior Ranger activity books and found out that the high today would be 94 degrees -- brutal, considering there’s no shade anywhere.
There are no showers at national park campgrounds. Keith and I haven’t cleaned up since the night before we left the KOA. We’re both feeling a little gross, and the heat makes it worse. I look and feel, and, I’m sure, smell, like a total greaseball.
At 10:30 most mornings, there’s a Junior Ranger talk outside the visitors center, so we attended that. It was lead by Ranger Julie, who fed us fun facts about bison and discussed their relationship with the people of the Lakota tribe. For some reason, after her program, Ranger Julie just handed out Junior Ranger badges and patches. Those things are like freaking gold, and usually rangers make kids jump through hoops to get them -- completing, like, a gazillion different painstaking activities in their books and then passing a quiz about everything they’ve learned. And even then, the stingy rangers at some parks just hand out badges. You have to ask -- and sometimes even pay for -- the cool iron-on patches. So finding Ranger Julie today was like hitting the jackpot. With our Badlands Junior Ranger status already achieved by 11 a.m., we were free to do whatever we wanted for the rest of the day.
(This is our fourth Junior Ranger badge in eight days, so we’re allowed to sound a little cynical. Actually, we love the Junior Ranger program, and can’t say enough good things about it. We all have learned so much about each of the parks we’ve visited.)
It was too hot to hike, and the kids (especially Charlie) wouldn’t venture far from the car for fear of rattlesnakes. So, we opted just to drive the park loop, stopping at scenic overlooks to admire the awesome views. This truly is a desolate area and a surreal landscape, with these otherworldly peaks and valleys, these fantastical forms, carved out of the prairie by wind and water over the last 500,000 years. And erosion rates suggest that the Badlands will exist for only 500,000 years more. It all reminds me making sand castles at the beach, building up towers in drips and dribbles as wet sand oozes out of my hand; that’s exactly what the Badlands look like.
Well, by 2 p.m., we had received our Junior Ranger badges, had seen most of the park, had eaten lunch, and were wondering what the heck to do with the kids -- in this heat -- for the rest of the day. The original plan had been to stay at the Badlands tonight, and push hard for Fargo on Saturday, then to Lake Superior on Sunday. But Keith and I made an executive decision to screw that plan. By 3 p.m. we had broken camp, packed up the gear, hitched up the trailer and were on our way east. We were disappointed to end our camping trip so abruptly and unceremoniously, but with our only other option being to entertain ourselves in that heat for another afternoon and evening, we were obliged to move on. We drove four hours to Mitchell, SD, today; we’ll drive five hours to the Twin Cities tomorrow; and on Sunday we’ll press on for the North Shore.
We’re staying at an AmericInn tonight. And the shower I just took must rank up there in my top-ten all-time-greatest.
No comments:
Post a Comment