Into South Dakota

South Dakota has a place in my family's history: it is the place Jackie and I went on our first date, or at least that's what I say. It is actually the first thing we agreed to do together, but because some time passed between our agreeing to go and the evening we drove to the airport, we did a couple of things together in between.

My walk will take me near the places we visited on that weekend in 1992 right before my 35th birthday. We landed in Rapid City; stayed in Custer; saw Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse; drove through Custer State Park chasing buffalo; toured Jewel Cave National Monument; went to the Badlands; and visited Mystic, South Dakota, a supposed ghost town that didn't consist of any buildings or anything at all as far as we could see, but I sang Van Morrison as we drove there, so there was that.

Mount Rushmore was kind of low key, but I liked it. You could walk up close pretty easily, and it is just an unusual monument - not huge, but still impressive. However, when we took the boys back in the early 2000s, I was much less impressed. They had built a whole sort of Disneyland Main Street leading up to it, and you had to walk through all that to get to the monument. It was expensive to visit, more crowded, and more fuss than seemed justified.

 My total journey through South Dakota will consist of 225 miles, more than five weeks of walking. Right now I am close to a town called St. Onge.  Next week, I will pass Sturgis, of motorcycle rally and Covid super-spreader fame, and then Rapid City the next week. After Rapid City, it's less-populated areas all the way to Nebraska sometime early in July.

Another geography lesson for me: I think of South Dakota as part of the Great White American north, along with Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho at least, and I'm sure it gets cold there, but today I realized that the norther border of South Dakota and the southern border of Washington are about the same latitude, so South Dakota is as far south as most of Oregon, which I never think of as far north. In fact, temperatures in Rapid City, SD and even Bismarck, North Dakota hit the 80s today, which we have not seen even once this year.

I am the one living in the far north, north of even several of Canada's larger cities. I need to get used to that.