Lady at the famous Wall Drug Store. Notice how enthralled this lady is as I explain to her the latest theories on Quantum Mechanics.

I was eight years old when my family drove through the Bad Lands on our way back from California. The place impressed me as a kid. Sixty years later, I was wondering if I had remembered it accurately. I did. It was almost exactly as I expected, and it was still impressive. The only thing I didn’t remember was all the grassland that surrounded the Park. That made for a fascinating boundary where the lush grasses met the stark formations of the Bad Lands.

It turns out that the eroding soil that is the Bad Lands is mostly volcanic ash. Each thin layer of ash represented thousands of years of ash deposits.

Of course, South Dakota was once a shallow sea. So, let’s see, New Mexico was once a shallow sea. Utah was once a shallow sea. This shallow sea business is especially interesting because each map we saw depicting this shallow sea did not include the other areas. For instance, Utah’s shallow sea map did not show South Dakota under water and visa versa. I guess the shallow sea roamed around a bit taking in the sights just like we are.

We hiked five different short, but fun trails, adding up to just 3 miles of walking. One trail, however, the Saddle Trail, was pretty much straight up, so we are tripling that half-mile, making our total for the day to be 4 miles.

In some areas the formations were pure white compressed ash. Most formations, however had red stripes. One area was tri-colored with yellow added to the whites and reds. The plaque stated that the red and yellow coloration was just oxidations, no fancy metals or minerals. Oxidations of what? The plaque didn’t elaborate.

Notice the tri-color formations. Originally, I saw those colors and thought: white = volcanic ash; red = oxidized iron; and yellow = sulfur in some form. But, outside of volcanic ash, the info plaques didn’t mention iron or sulfur. We never did find out exactly what caused the reds and yellows.

Heading up the Saddle Trail.

Hoodoos, South Dakota style.

Going down Saddle Trail was more treacherous than going up. Look at that loose sand just waiting to slide you all the way down, skinning up your legs, arms, and torso.

This poor hoodoo fell over.

My family also stopped at Wall Drug Store in Wall, South Dakota, on that California trip. I knew Wall Drug was a tourist trap, but as long as we were retracing my childhood summer vacation, we checked it out.

Here my memory did not match the present day store. I just remember a single store, not the conglomerate mess it has turned into. Try as I might, I did not find one aspirin, band-aid, or any other drug related item anywhere in the store. I did find lots of tourist trinkets and more T-shirts than you could wear in a lifetime. Basically, it was a mall with a western theme, at least mostly. There was one animated dinosaur that sang songs. I don’t think the old West had many singing dinosaurs.

This Wall Drug Mall had a couple dozen individual stores. There were about a half dozen rock shops, a half dozen trinket shops, and at least a full dozen T-shirt shops. Oh yeah, and one large restaurant.

For about a hundred miles in all directions, Wall Drug had roadside billboards building up the Wall Drug experience. One promise was free ice water. That cracked me up. The free ice water was two little bubblers serving rather warm-ish water into tiny paper cones. I think that is a perfect metaphore for the “promise vs. delivery” of the Wall Drug Store. Any RVer hoping to fill up a couple of jugs of ice water were in for a big disappointment.

It was a pretty long looping drive so we didn’t accomplish much more than that for the day. Still, it was another glorious day of adventure and exploration.

Glossary of terms used for newcomers: 1) V-Jer. The name of our camper. 2) Saturn. The name of our Van. 3) Duende. Our mischievous gremlin that breaks things. 4) Tata. The good gremlin that helps us fix Duende’s dirty work. 5) The Black Hole. This is what we call Walmart because every time we go in for just a couple of items, we come out spending way more than we figured. 6) QT. Quaint Town. 7) Little Buddy. This is what we call our Dyson cordless stick vacuum.

Dave and Wanda

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