Sorry for the false advertisement in my last post that I would have the Day 2 post finished last night - I had more schoolwork than I originally envisioned.
Anyway! So Geoclub trip day 2 - I left off in my narrative with Felicia's underwear being found in the road as we left our campsite that morning. After a quick breakfast at Mickey D's we hit the road and headed for our first stops of geologic interest in South Dakota. Again, let me start out this blog post with a huge endorsement - I went to field camp in Turkey (see previous posts) but the program was through South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. SDSM&T, located in Rapid City, SD, also runs a field program in the Black Hills. When I was applying to the Turkey program, I remember seeing the Black Hills option on the website as well and thinking "who would want to do that? lame." Judgmental, yes. BUT what I can now honestly say, as a previous skeptic, is that the Black Hills area of South Dakota is AMAZING!!!!!! The Hills themselves are pretty small but the area is beautiful and there's so much interesting stuff there in terms of geology, history, and cheesy tourist stuff (more on that later!) that Megan and I both felt like we could have spent several more days there.
Our first stop in South Dakota was in the town of Chamberlain, which is located on the Missouri River ("Big Muddy!"). We stopped there for a picnic lunch and showed the students the river terraces along the present channel. River terraces are abandoned floodplains that were active when the river was higher than its present level. That doesn't mean the river was actually deeper and filled the channel up to the height of the terraces, it means that the river hadn't cut through the material beneath yet. As the river erodes and cuts down more and more, it creates a deeper and deeper valley with several generations of terraces. A lot of field camps that go west stop at this location to see the terraces, so maybe our students will be seeing this spot again! Here is a picture of Kevin teaching the group about terrace formation and the type of rock seen in the background:
Megan and I spent a lot of time in the car reading aloud to each other from the "Roadside Geology" series. There is a book for every state (I think?!) and we had them for all the states we visited!! We got pretty into even the details of what we were seeing on the trip. For instance, we were nerdily able to immediately identify the rock type of the rip-rap along the river bank as being Sioux quartzite! It is a metamorphosed sandstone stained by oxidized iron-rich grains in the sand, so it has an overall pink appearance. Me being a nerd with my book (note the quartzite!):
I noticed that South Dakotans are pretty into three things: 1) dinosaurs, 2) large fake rodents, 3) advertising. One of the South Dakota gas companies has green dinosaurs at all its stations, so we saw lots of those guys, but we also saw lots of dinosaurs just hanging out in fields on the side of the road. Felicia and me on the gas station dinosaur:
Random local dinosaur grazing in the field along the interstate:
South Dakotans also like really large chipmunks apparently. This is the world's largest chipmunk, weighing 6 tons!
South Dakotans also really like advertising. For just about anything. You wouldn't believe how many signs there were for that chipmunk alone! There are many, but probably the biggest tourist trap in South Dakota is Wall Drug. What started out as a tiny drug store in Wall, SD, in the 1930's has grown into a sprawling tourist trap, complete with, as one might expect, a large dinosaur. It's basically the South-of-the-Border of the North. We saw signs for Wall Drug starting about 2 hours away from it. I think I counted about 90 signs total... We ate dinner at the Mexican restaurant there on night 2. This is the big sign out front when you pull up:
When in South Dakota though, make sure not to miss other great tourist attractions like 1880 Town (also has a dinosaur close by), the Corn Palace, and Deadwood!
I think I'm running out of usable space in this post (too many dinos and big chipmunk pictures!) so I'll have to make the next post about the geology of what we saw in the Rapid City area. We spent several days in the area, so consider this post all the "cultural" stuff from South Dakota and the next will be about the actual geology.
As some of you might know, at the time of writing, I am on a 13 days on $13 regimen. I am finding that when you can't spend money, you have much more time to do things you otherwise wouldn't do like read books and blog :) It's kind of nice! So be expecting regular postings over the next week+.
Happy trails!
Sarah
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