Completed
Quick bonus post to celebrate completing all the parks, trails, et cetera in South Dakota. The photos above are from the Badlands, Jewel & Wind Caves, Minuteman Missile and Mount Rushmore. The Missouri NRR borders the state and includes Yankton’s Meridian Bridge, which is nice for walking or biking and has a good kayak launch nearby. Lewis & Clark stopped here too, and there are several sites on their trail where the Yankton tribe showed them around South Dakota.
“O, Shenandoah, I love your daughter,
American folk song
Away you rolling river.
I’ll take her ‘cross yon rolling water.
Ah-ha, I’m bound away, ‘cross the wide Missouri.”
Above looks upstream from the hill above Mulberry Bend in the 59 mile eastern park district, where Lewis & Clark scouted some 219 years ago, along with other places introduced by the Yankton Sioux, one of many tribes that helped the expedition. The Yankton Sioux relinquished most of their land 165 years ago before either South Dakota (right) or Nebraska (left) were states, but they are still considered defenders of Pipestone in Minnesota. Their reservation runs along the north bank of most of the 39 mile western park district, above the confluence of the Niobrara, and they are park partners. Both districts of the park preserve the natural river flow, without commercial traffic, and most power boaters stick to Lewis & Clark Lake in the middle.
Further up the ‘big muddy’ Missouri River, at the confluence of the Knife River in North Dakota, teen mom Sacagawea joined their expedition with her French fur trapper husband and their infant. Like Pocahontas, her story is part of America, and similar stories are part of our heritage. As a child, I loved the song “Shenandoah” but was confused whether it was about the Shenandoah River in Virginia or the Missouri River. Turns out, Skenandoa was an Iroquois Chief, whose daughter was stolen by a French fur trapper and taken away across the wide Missouri River. Romantic stories about natives are part of our cultural heritage, albeit often one-sided. Especially given current tragedies of missing and murdered indigenous women, more effort—and funding—is needed to protect these women and tell more stories from a Native American perspective.
There are three sites along the interstate: a visitor center, a missile silo and a launch control facility for multiple silos. Apparently the whole area was like a prairie dog town of silos. For decades, all the sites were manned and secured continuously, so that we could annihilate our enemies many times over, as they could to us. The cost of this ludicrous overkill capacity was staggering.
But what interests me most is the claim made in Life magazine above that only 3% would die. Actually, we’d be lucky if 3% survived. How could we have been so wrong? We listened to the wrong scientists. Physicists designed the nuclear bomb, so they had the full attention of the military. They analyzed the problem by describing payload, flash of light, shockwave and fallout. Only when someone asked whether nuclear war would blot out the sun for years did we realize that the physicists completely underestimated the risk to life on earth. Why? Because the study of life on earth isn’t physicists’ job. That’s the job of biologists. We were listening to the wrong scientists.
Our public understanding of the climate crisis is very similar. We’re still not listening to the right scientists. Whenever I ask a physics expert about global warming, I always get the same answer: ”the planet will be fine”. They mean that it will continue spinning. Geologists answer that temperatures vary naturally within large ranges over eons. Meteorologists say that it won’t tell you if you need to bring an umbrella today. Again we are listening to the wrong scientists.
Biologists study life on earth, so they will tell you that the climate crisis will extinguish most forms of life on earth, either directly, by changing their environment more quickly than they can adapt, or indirectly, by collapsing some critical part of the ecological networks they rely on for food, reproduction, or any other part of their existence. These are the scientists who study whether life on earth will survive, and they’re the ones who are telling us that the risks are too great to continue carbon pollution. As living, supposedly sentient beings on this planet, we naturally should be interested in the survival of life here. We need to listen to the right scientists who know and are telling us what we need to do to avert the coming catastrophe.
I took the photo just a minute after arriving at Cedar Pass campground. Much of the “original badlands” scenery is down in canyons, but these peaks are more photogenic. The long loop road is worth it, and the park allows even off-trail scrambling. The ranger talk was excellent, and I learned that the town of Wall (and famous Wall Drug Store) is named after the barrier that the park’s landscape presents to travel.
I like Mount Rushmore, but it’s in the wrong place. The Presidents selected all had issues with Native Americans (although the Presidents were all long dead when the monument was sculpted). The sculptor was a KKK member who wanted to sculpt confederate leaders, but that’s just a side note. No, the problem is that the monument is carved into the sacred Black Hills which may be the most shamefully taken, fought over and litigated place in America. It doesn’t help that the surrounding area is filled with common tourist traps, and that the tourist dollars do not go to the tribes who legitimately (according to Court decision) should own the land. Even though they have Tesla chargers in the parking lot, I just can’t appreciate the site as I did years ago.
I’ve now only a couple caves left to explore in the system. I’m all out of troll, dragon and lizard-people jokes. So, instead I will just encourage you to reserve your tour in advance, since they can sell out. I was lucky to get the last single ticket to the shortest tour, where I was able to see the jewel-like dog’s tooth structure above. There are many more interesting crystal and other features to see. And the cave maps continue to expand as new sections are explored.
The park is most famous for containing much of the world’s boxworks, pictured, which is the ‘mortar’ left over after most of the rock dissolved. The tour included a recitation of the origin myth of the Lakota people and the bison, since the cave is a central and sacred part of the story. The neighboring Custer State Park is a great place to see bison today, and they often wander across the road.
Since I was inspired here by an obscure fact about forest fire frequency, here’s another rant. There’s a popular misconception that park service mismanagement or ”fire suppression” caused many forests to overfill with fuel, creating conditions for today’s wildfires. Smokey the Bear encouraged people not to smoke or leave campfires unattended, but neither he nor the forest service has ever had the ability to put out a naturally occurring wildfire. Even the best efforts today can merely partially contain wildfires to try to protect structures.
So why did the fuel build up? Well, that’s because farmers, ranchers and timbermen cut down all the surrounding forests. Many of the remaining forests are isolated, so that wildfires that would have entered from neighboring areas stopped. The remedy to restore the natural balance would be to enlarge the forests and regrow the surrounding ecotones or transition zones with native scrub and grassland. Funnily enough, you don’t hear that solution often proposed. Instead, folks use farmer, rancher and timberman logic and suggest scheduled burns, like they use on their land. But there’s nothing natural or statistically normal about following a schedule, so the park service, which is the victim here, is left with no choice but to try to maintain forests artificially, which typically results in lower species diversity than the original.
In any case, with climate change, even using prescribed burns won’t save forests from increased bug damage, warmer winters, hotter summers, drier air, longer wildfire seasons, hotter fires and increased wind. I mention this because there are nearby areas where forests aren’t regrowing, since the extremely high temperature of the fire overcooked the soil, killing the microbial life needed to sustain the original trees. We need more accurate and truthful thinking about fires if we are going to save species in the future.
Zero Carbon Travel 