Category: South Dakota

  Porter Sculpture Park About 30 miles west of Sioux Falls in the middle of corn fields near Montrose, South Dakota, you pass the silhouette of a 60 foot, 25 ton iron bull’s head welded together from railroad tie plates. We found this place online for roadside attractions. If we hadn’t we would have driven…

  The Corn Palace The Corn Palace is a concert hall / sports center in Mitchell, SD, that is decorated with elaborate murals constructed from different colors of dried corn. Each year a new theme is chosen and murals designed to match the them. This year the theme was “homegrown” with murals featuring people and…

  For over 11,000 years the badlands region of South Dakota has been inhabited by native people. The soft sedimentary layers of soil once under a body of water are easily eroded, currently at the rate of 1 inch per year, which leads to deep winding valleys and buttes striped with color. Originally authorized in…

  There’s not much to see on the drive across South Dakota. Fortunately enterprising folks have been constructing roadside kitsch since the newly created National Parks drew visitors from all over after the turn of the century. Today there’s a lot less of them and the remaining sites are often in disrepair, but still some…

  We drove into the Black Hills setting off from Little Big Horn. An island of Ponderosa pine covered granite mountains and hills rising up out of a sea of flat farmland on all sides. The granite was pushed up as part of the same geological events that created the Rocky Mountains and the area…