2024-09-18: Pierre to Rapid City

I had a reasonable night’s sleep at the Days Inn in Pierre. There was a very average complimentary breakfast on offer that I availed myself of before I got myself ready to jump on the bike and hit the road. It was due to be another lovely, but windy, day in South Dakota with temperatures into the high 80ºF range (30ºC)

Before leaving town, I wanted to check out the South Dakota Capitol building, which with Pierre only being a town of about 13,000, was only a few blocks away. I took a loop around the entire capitol area before parking right up in front of the building for a quick photo op. It was really quaint watching the half dozen, or so, low-rise government buildings that surrounded the capitol be just about the only state government buildings in the place.

After that it was a gas-up stop and then I was across the Missouri River to the West River portion of South Dakota on my way to Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. By this point, I’d not touched an Interstate since rushing to make my way out of Duluth to Marv’s house in Brainerd, Minnesota and it was here I resolved to keep my phone’s navigation set to “avoid highways” to keep me on smaller state and county roads from here on out.

I stayed on US-14 west out of Pierre, and found that the state was replacing a number of culverts on the route, and setup dirt road detours around the works that gave me a bit of anxiety at first, as I was on a 600lb giant motorcycle loaded with a month’s worth of my life’s possessions. But after the first, I found they were well-graded and maintained with the dry weather.

Before long, my phone then had me taking a left southbound onto a dirt road, called Cottonwood Road, and I thought… “huh this avoiding highway thing could get me into trouble here in South Dakota or Wyoming”. The road went on up and over a hill a ways in the distance. I trundled on down the road around 30 mph (40 km/h) as the wind started to pick up.

As I crested the hill I got my first look at some of the peaks of the Badlands National Park way out on the horizon as well as Interstate 90 as trucks zoomed by. I just so happened to find myself right under a cell tower and with great reception gave my brother a call to check-in with him and update him on my progress.

It turned out that I was less that 300 yards (300 m) away from the National Historic Site parking lot, and that the dirt road I’d taken actually directly connected to the interstate off-ramp for both it and the Badlands National Park North unit. Great success! I stopped in to tour the visitors center and see its museum. Turns out, in the 1960s, the Great Plains states were made host to the majority of the land-based US ICBM arsenal. The whole place was littered with underground Minuteman missile silos, ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Evidently, the government thought that keeping these silos far away from major population centers would help prevent further loss of life in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike to eliminate the launch sites. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the time to speak with any of the park rangers, and didn’t realize that the site actually featured a silo that was open to the public to tour. I left without checking that part of the historic site out.

However, next up on my plan for the day was to check out Badlands National Park just down the road. The park had an incredible view of their canyons and rock formations as soon as you passed the entry station. I stopped in for a short hike and photo op here of the amazing scenery.

Back on the bike, I headed toward the park’s visitor center. The ride along the main park road was awesome, both for the ride (granted it was at the National Park scenic road standard speed of 35 mph (50 km/h), but also with the badlands scenery within mere feet of the road as I went along.

The visitor center was pretty busy with tourists from all over stopping in, but I managed to learn about a few more scenic overlooks along my planned route and picked up both a stamp for my National Parks passport as well as a souvenir iron-on patch and pin.

Back out onto the road, and I set course for the nearby town of Wall via the scenic parkway through Badlands National Park. The road was awesome, with it twisting and turning around the badlands peaks, as well as rising up and diving down as it climbed and descended from the plateau above to the eroded badlands areas below several times. I stopped at Panoramic View overlook and snapped photos all along the way.

Before too long I was out out of the park and approaching Wall, home of the roadside attraction Wall Drug. I’d seen ads for the place starting about 100 miles away, even on the back road ways I’d taken to get there. Free ice water, 5¢ coffee, Levis, cafe, they had it all, or so they advertised. Outside of town the advertising was nuts, with at least 4 full-size billboards advertising all the things to touch, smell, taste, hear and see at Wall Drug. The place itself was huge, taking up fully half of downtown Wall, a full city block. The whole place was crawling with tourists, but I still had to stop in to say I had, plus, by this point, I was hungry for lunch!

I walked in to what turned out to be the actual drugstore part of Wall Drug. It was actually pretty typical, but this was only one room inside of at least 50 different areas. I walked through a passageway and into the cafe area to order some grub for lunch. I saw all kinds of tasty treats on offer, but decided on a salad with chicken. The service was quite quick, despite the place being pretty busy, but I overheard some of the staff saying that on this day in mid-September that it wasn’t even close to as busy as it tended to get in the peak summer season. The salad was a healthy size and quite tasty. It was definitely one of the better salads I’ve had at a roadside attraction.

After lunch, I decided to take a browse around Wall Drug, and found it to be quite a wholesome and interesting roadside attraction, with loads of shopping available. There was a toy store as well as a replica old-timey western downtown area with a book store, gemstone store and camping store areas. I didn’t really have a lot of room for more souvenirs, so I went back to the cafe for a coffee and one of the tasty-looking donuts I had passed up at lunch.

The coffee was in fact 5¢ if you didn’t get your cup to go, and the donut was pretty awesome. After such a tasty experience, I just had to try a slice of pie that they also had loads of on display. Another 5¢ cup of coffee to go with it as well and I was both very full and fully-caffeinated. My advice: get the donut and skip on the pie. The donuts taste like they’re made on-site, while the pie tastes like grocery store pie, despite looking really good in their display cases.

After stuffing my face with desserts, it was back out on the road to stay off-highway but head toward Rapid City, South Dakota. My route had me heading back into Badlands National Park, on several back roads for about 60 miles (100 km). The route was once again quite scenic and had a few gravel road sections, but luckily nothing too gnarly.

After a bit more than 90 minutes, I was making my way into Rapid City right around 3:30pm with my motel right in downtown Rapid City. I was even a little early for the check-in time for a change!

After checking in, I went for a walk around downtown Rapid City, and found myself at a bar enjoying some local beers and a Mediterranean mezze platter for dinner, before walking back to my motel for a nice, early bedtime around 10:00pm.

It was a nice, relaxing day today. Pleasant rides and attractions, good food, and not a slog by any stretch. Even some dirt for my GS riding cred. All told it was only a 220 mile (321 km) day, but it was a nice break to see some sites and not be stressed out trying to knock out the miles!