North to Alaska » South Dakota

Minuteman Missile Command Centre

greg — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 17:09:07 +0000

We visited the Minuteman command and control centre in South Dakota. This is now a national monument, but was built by the US Government in the early 1960s, as part of its response to the Cuban missle crisis. The control centre commanded ten ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) which were Minutemen I missiles armed with 1.2 Mega tonne nuclear warheads. The support building is on the surface but we decended 10 metres into the ground to the shielded control centre. The control centre had two staff who did a 24 hour shift. The control centre was shielded against attack, with backup generators and air supplies. The two controllers could launch all ten missiles simultaneously with the turn of two keys. The missiles had no self-destruct and could not be turned back. The ten missiles were placed several kilometres away from the command centre. There were five command centres each controlling ten missiles in each “flight” in South Dakota.

The 8 tonne blast door protecting the underground control centre. The flight time of the Minuteman Missiles was 30 minutes to their targets in the Soviet Union.

Control panel of the commander showing the status of all ten missiles.

Two control seats. The seats are mounted on rails so their can absorb shock. The whole command centre is also suspended to absorb shock. Red box are the right contained the two command keys.

Delta-09, one of the ten missile silos controlled by the Delta control centre, which was about 10 km from the control centre.

Minuteman missile in Silo at Delta-09

Sage Creek, Badlands, South Dakota

Judy — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:31:07 +0000

We hadn’t known about Badlands National Park until we chatted with a family from South Carolina when we were all camping at Exit Glacier, Alaska. They encouraged us to spend some time there, and as Badlands is just a bit further east of the Black Hills, we thought it would be a good place to see. Lots of history, lots of geology and erosion, and lots of wildlife. The area got its name from both the native Americans who lived around the area - mako sica = land bad, and from the French fur trappers who called it a ‘bad land to cross’. You can read more about the area here.

On the way to Badlands, we stopped at Wall, a little town on the I90 which is most famous for its huge drugstore, which now sells almost everything and has become a big tourist destination. A couple of guys from Mississippi told Greg about it when we were camping west of Yellowstone, and we had started seeing billboards advertising Wall Drug hundreds of kms away. Apparently they spend $400,000 on advertising per year. Huge, touristy, entertaining.

We camped at the Sage Creek campground, a ‘primitive’ campground with a lovely mown grassy area, vault toilets but no water. It was free to camp there and as you can see from the photo, there were plenty of people camping there.

The sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires of Badlands look like something from another planet. We drove through part of the park early in the morning and colours of the rocks were beautiful. The park has a herd of 800+ buffalo, and we drove through a couple of hundred of them – the ‘wildlife jammers’ in Yellowstone would have gone crazy over seeing so many! We also saw prairie dogs, a white-tailed deer and a pack of pronghorn.

In addition to visiting the Minuteman Missile Command Centre, we went to see a sod prairie homestead and Wounded Knee, south of the national park. So much history. so much heartbreak

The Bison/Buffalo heard we drove through in Badlands National Park

Bison up close (taken from safely inside the car!)

Pronghorn sheep in the Badlands

Badlands

The Black Hills, South Dakota

Judy — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 18:13:24 +0000

We have spent the last few days camping in State Forest and National Park campgrounds. All are very well-resourced (by Australian camping standards), and it seems to be a standard thing at this time of the year that the state forest campgrounds have a host who takes the camping fees, keeps the toilets clean and mows the grass on and around the sites. The night after our electrifying experience near Sundance, we camped in a little campground near Nemo in the Black Hills. Lovely, apart from the serenity-shattering generator that seemed to be almost constantly running in the large RV parked at the site next to us. And while I’m having a whinge, although this is really just an observation of a cultural difference – Americans love having open fires when they camp. They rarely use them for cooking or to keep warm (they have RVs with loud generators for that!), although they might toast marshmallows to make s’mores (sweet biscuit, Hershey’s chocolate & marshmallow sandwiched together, way too sweet for me), It is totally against our nature to have a campfire in summer.

So, to touristy stuff, sort of … we visited Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument-in-progress yesterday. Actually, ‘visited’ might be a bit misleading. We parked a few hundred metres either side of the carpark entrance to Rushmore and looked at it from face-on, and then at the profile of George Washington. As it was a Sunday, the queue to get into the carpark was long, and we didn’t want to pay $11 . It’s ‘free’ to get into Rushmore, but they get you by charging you to park, and there’s no parking anywhere outside near the monument. I really liked the profile, and it was much closer than the face-on view would have been, even from inside the monument’s grounds. The Crazy Horse monument was started in the late 1940s, and is expected to take many, many years to complete. So far only his face, the upper edge of his outstretched arm and part of the horse’s head and mane have been done.

And here’s the song you’ve all been waiting for – the lyrics are there so if you don’t know all the words, you can sing still along

Camped near Nemo in the Black Hills ( we got lost but someone told us how to find Nemo)

Mount Rushmore with George Washington in profile

The free view of Mount Rushmore

Crazy Horse memorial , a few hundred years from completion.