There were two things I’d wanted to do in South Dakota. One of them was to go into the Badlands to a remote campground I’d found and check out the stars at night. I figure that is probably one of the best places there is to see lots and lots of stars. I had decided against it the day before both because it would have taken too much time and because I was darn tired and didn’t want to mess with setting up and breaking down camp.

These guys helped me with my thinking (odd statues in the hotel parking lot):

The other thing was to visit the Minuteman Missle Launch Control Facility. I’d seen this one online and it jumped onto the “must do” list. Knowing that the chances that the tours would be tough to get tickets to I’d decided to get up, leave all my stuff in the hotel and hope that I could get a ticket to one of the earlier morning tours.

I went off to the visitor center and got in line for the tour passes. The folks in front of me got the last passes for a tour that started at 10:30 (it was not quite 8:30) and I started to think that I wouldn’t have time to do the tour. I had to put in enough miles to get a good way through the endless state of Wyoming and also wanted to see Mt. Rushmore so I almost got out of line and took off. Glad I didn’t because it turned out there was *one* ticket left for the 9:00 tour. I grabbed it and scooted over to Delta-01.

The visitor center was about 20 miles *east* of where I’d stayed. My hotel was really close to the missile silo part of the exhibit but the “park” is broken up into three distinct places – visitor center, missile silo and launch control, all separated by quite a few miles. Launch control was in the middle so I first backtracked and then started back west.

I was not disappointed by the tour. Our guide was a retired Air Force major that had served as a “missileer” at this very facility. He was great – funny, knowledgeable and clearly enjoying his job. There are pretty good pictures at the NPS site linked above that cover most of the tour but I snapped a few.

The above ground part of the facility is a fenced in area roughly a half acre, maybe a bit more in size. The building isn’t all that big – about the size of a subdivision house – and looks a lot like it was built for a low to mid level development. Reminded me of my first house, actually.

The SubZero refrigerators caught my eye – we bought one for our last house and while I’ll be the first to admit that it was a very nice refrigerator it was awfully expensive. If one were to buy these two units at a store today, one would spend the better part of $20k.

It is the below ground part that is really interesting… it is a vault built out of huge metal bars and concrete, about four or five feet thick. There’s a door on the entrance that would put any bank vault to shame… about 16,000 lbs of steel and concrete. Again, there are good pics on the NPS site but when the tour guide asked if anyone wanted a picture in front of the command console I was all over that…

…and the older computer systems always interest me. Reliable as all getout but not especially fancy or capable by today’s standards.

The only part of my morning that I could have possibly wished were different is that I forgot my satellite tracker for my trip to the visitor and command centers so there were some miles that weren’t tracked. I got over that really fast.

Having been as lucky as I was to get into the tour I decided to scoot on back to the hotel and skip seeing the missile silo. I’ve seen those before so it wasn’t quite as big a deal to see again and by moving along I decided that I had time to go through Mt. Rushmore on my way west.

So there it is. It was kind of cool to see the mountain but it was exactly what one would expect from all the pictures. You can see it from the road on the way up and I would suggest stopping at the turnout where the mountain is visible, taking pictures there and skipping the official site. Parking was expensive – 20 bucks for a motorcycle?!? – and the facility was a really expensive looking granite structure that I guess was supposed to be impressive.

My last comment on it is that it was busy and hard to get in and out of during the off season. The parking structure is 5 or 6 levels and only the top two were much used, with people driving around and around the second level looking for non-existent spots instead of just going down one. I expect that during the summer it is an absolute nightmare – unbelievably crowded. I won’t be going back unless someone I’m travelling with really wants to.

That got me about halfway through the day. The rest was spent riding across Wyoming, “the endless state”. I did like the 80 mph speed limit but the wind was high enough that I didn’t go a whole lot faster than that. I learned that my mileage is greatly impacted by wind – it’ll knock me down into the 25mpg range at those speeds.

I managed to find a campground in the Bighorn forest that I’d seen from Google maps and thought, “hey, that would be a good spot”. Pulled in shortly before sundown, got everything set up before dark.

I finally had a chance to use my satellite tracker thingie to send text messages. Worked fine, but I did have to climb up out of the valley I was in to get a signal.

There were only a few other people camping there. Some really nice folks in a 5th wheel came over to my campsite bringing firewood with them – they said it was extra. Awfully nice of them to play Welcome Wagon, and I appreciated having my one campfire of the trip. It was cold up there so especially nice.

This was my favorite campsite of the three I used. It was right next to a mountain stream and the white noise it generated made for a really restful night’s sleep.