Day 8: The badlands, on all 4 cylinders

The mechanic fixed our auto problem in the morning (a closed spark plug gap, most likely caused by some kind of debris entering the engine) and even showed us how to fix the problem ourselves if it ever happens again.  So back on all 4 cylinders, we drove by the Corn Palace.  It is a building with murals made of colored corn on the outside.  The fact that people actually pull over for it is a testament to how terribly boring this particular strip of I-90 is.  Moving on, we passed lots and lots of cows and lots and lots of signs for Wall Drug and in one case a group of cows enjoying the shade of a sign for Wall Drug, and  headed over to our next bit of roadside excitement off of I-90: the nuclear missile silos!

During the cold war, these silos were scattered throughout the Midwest.  Most of them have been destroyed and filled in with concrete as a result of the STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) but a few in South Dakota have been left as museums run by the park service...although the guides did inform us that the missile on display is actually a test missile with no warhead and no fuel (drat!).  One of the sites is left exactly as it was.  The only change is the addition of a plexiglass window so you can see the warhead, and pamphlets for a guided audio tour.  We also went to the visitors' center, where the guide showed us some cool stuff, like a bundle of cables that runs to the site, with a pressure-sensitive sensor that will go off if any of the cables are cut. (And naturally, everything is EMP shielded).


But, but, the Park Service said it was OK!  They're authorized to let me in to one of these, right?

A bunk room in the command center.  I am pretty sure I had that exact model of desk and chair in my college dorm.

Dig the computers!

At the other site, we got to actually go inside on a tour.  It's a pretty comfortable 60s trailer-style building inside, with some roomy dorms and a place to watch TV.  Underground is where the missiliers stay on shift, inside a giant box that's hung from chains to prevent damage from earthquakes or other traumatic impacts.  The room is one of those 60s things...full of big computers with obscurely labeled switches and dials and buttons that could all fit on your iPhone with room to spare.  The missiliers would stay there for 12 hours at a time, doing nothing but listening for a "warble tone" that almost never came (the tour guide explained that they would often be enrolled in government-sponsored masters programs and get their coursework done down there; there's also a bunk where one of them can sleep while the other is on shift).  If they did hear the tone, they would get a message and then have to decode it.  If it was a message to fire, they would have to both enter their own personal secret combinations onto one of two padlocks, which would then open a box containing keys.  Each missilier would put his key into a keyhole and turn it simultaneously--the two keyholes were too far apart for one person to turn both--and then another site somewhere else would have to do the same thing.  This fires the missiles and starts WWIII.  Naturally, my main reaction was that breaking into a command center and firing the missiles somehow would make a great video game puzzle.  Other highlights of the area for me were observing a dung beetle (hey, I'm easily amused, but it's pretty cool to watch them take a little ball of dung and roll it backwards) and a snake (actually, we almost ran over it).

Rollin' rollin', keep that dung ball rollin'...

After the silo tour, we drove on to the Badlands (aka the White Hills).
Wow.
Driving into the Badlands is...mindblowing.  First you're driving through the beautiful, but sort of monotonous, grasslands, and then you drive up to a little kiosk and pay your park entry fee (or don't, since their cash registers were out of order) and drive in and WHAT THE HELL you're on another planet.  There are even spots where to the left side of the road are badlands and to the right is totally normally grass.  I think I took a thousand photos that all look basically the same: crazy rises and hills and spires and sloping cliffs of perfectly continuously striped red and yellow and brown rock and ground that's cracked with dryness into a thousand pieces.  BUT THEY WERE ALL AMAZING.  We also went on a bit of a short hike on Door Trail, but the signs posted everywhere like "beware of rattlesnakes" spooked us a bit (as did the very very hot sun) so we didn't go far, just enjoyed the landscape that felt like it should be a car commercial, only people would be like what, did you film your car commercial on Mars?

Driving through the Badlands we also got to see some wildlife...a few turkeys, a whole herd of wild goats.  We then went on to Sage Creek Rim Road, where we caught our first buffalo, right by the side of the road.  We were not then (although 2 days later, we are now) people who laugh at others for pulling over just to see a buffalo.  They are huge and scary and very mangy looking, and one was scratching its back on an informative interpretive sign.  We also spotted a ton of prairie dogs, who were all prairie-dog like, standing on their hind legs and jumping and such.

Oh, and we went to Wall Drug, but it was closed.  We finished up in Rapid City, SD where we immediately collapsed into bed.

Typical highway sights (cattle grazing by the side of the road here is so common I didn't normally bother to photograph it, but I thought these guys were being particularly photogenic)