7/5 Day 11

We went to Badlands National Park this morning, just east of Wall, South Dakota. What I expected would be around an hour and a half of mostly driving turned into 4 hours of driving and hiking through some of the most spectacular scenery we’ve seen to date. The morning was hot—80 by 9 AM. Of course, if we’re going to be out on the prairie, we’ll pick the hottest day to do it!

Afterwards, we drove to Rapid City, our stopping off point to see Mt. Rushmore and a lot of other neat stuff. During our drive, we noticed a large thunderstorm just to the south of us. A few minutes later, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for the area we were watching! We got a lot of rain and had to pull over due to the high wind, but no tornado, thank God!

There are more photos here then I usually post, so this page may load slow, but it was difficult to narrow down the 96 photos I took today to the 7 shown here. The next update will probably be Tuesday or so. Should have more interesting photos then. Thanks to all of you who are keeping in touch!!