Badlands National Park & Delta-09 Missile Silo
On the way to Badlands National Park, we stopped at the famous Wall Drug Store in Wall, SD (4/25/2022). We also visited the Minuteman Missile Visitors Center and Delta-09 Missile Silo when we were in the area.
Wall Drug Store in Wall, SD
I’d never heard of the Wall Drug Store until I saw it recently in the Nomadland movie that came out a couple of years back, but apparently, it’s pretty famous and has managed to stay in business for almost 90 years now. Even though it’s in the middle of nowhere, it became huge when the owners started advertising free ice water to people driving on the nearby Route 16A on their way to Yellowstone. Now it gets up to 20,000 visitors a day in the summer and has all kinds of free attractions such as a giant Jackalope, life-size animated T-Rex, cedar tree carvings of Butch Cassidy, and a Mount Rushmore replica, a museum, and dozens of shops selling just about everything. Most of the family stuff was still closed since it was not summer so we browsed a bit, and finally just settled on a couple of $.05 cups of coffee and a maple donut. The dining room was covered in oil paintings and it turns out they have one of the best private collections (over 300 pieces) of Western art in the country.
Badlands National Park
After leaving Wall, we went a few miles just outside the Badlands National Park where we would be dry camping at an area called the Nomad View Dispersed Camping. This one is right on the rim of a canyon that is the edge of the Badlands so while we had a very impressive view, it was also pretty windy. After a couple of days there, we ended up leaving a night early and going back to Wall after it got so bad and we couldn’t find a better position to move the motorhome to. It’s called the Badlands because that’s what the Lakota and early French trappers both called it due to how difficult the terrain is to travel through. It was early Spring and a very desolate feeling. In contrast, apparently, it gets very green as we saw in some pictures. While we were there, the location was perfect as we were just minutes from the north side Pinnacles entrance of the National Park. On the first day we did a 60-mile loop in the Jeep via Sage Creek Road -> Rim Road -> Scenic, SD -> Route 44 -> Route 509 -> back to the Pinnacles entrance. On another day we went to the other end of the park to the Northeast Entrance and did some hiking at the Window Trail and Notch Trail. There are plenty of scenic overlooks to stop at and we probably saw the most wildlife we’ve seen in a park in a day including prairie dog towns, pronghorns, mountain sheep, bison, etc all in great quantities.
Minuteman Delta-09 Missile Silo
In between all this, we made a visit to the nearby Minuteman Delta-09 missile silo and visitor center. There is a phone number you can call to get an audio tour which we did via our cell phones. You can basically tour inside the fence at the whole facility and peer into the silo. Fascinating exhibits at the visitor center, they had a really good book collection on all things nuclear weapons. It is crazy to think that just in this one area of South Dakota there are over a thousand silos just like it.