Guest Post: South Dakota — YOFO Adventures

Greetings YOFO readers and followers! It’s Kady and Nate here to tell you about some super cool adventures we had in South Dakota.

It starts with the travels; we had an unfortunate series of events which led to new plane tickets, longer flights and first class seats (let’s make that a singular seat seeing as only one of us had the pleasure of being Mr. Fancypants for a couple hours). Did that stop the fun?? It most certainly did not. Less than two hours after we landed we were standing in front of Crazy Horse Memorial. Shortly after, we visited Mount Rushmore and walked a short hike with views of each president centered perfectly in between the trees. Unfortunately, we did not find the city of gold.

The next day we woke up early and hiked the badlands. We climbed a few huge rock structures and it was unlike anything we had ever seen. During our hike we encountered some wild Bighorn Sheep, thankfully no rattlesnake sightings. After the hike we took a drive through the rest of the Badlands National Park and spotted our first bison! We also had a close encounter with a prairie dog. We kid you not, the little pup walked up to Nate’s shoe and sniffed it...probably deeming us unworthy. Then the prairie dog walked over to another hole and guess what?! WE WATCHED IT POOP. I’m pretty sure Dawn went to heaven for about 5 minutes. Later at sunset we walked a few other small hikes and took some great pictures. The badlands looked like a mini grand canyon...dad took a panorama shot of us (just look for the insignificant little blob on the left side).

The next day we drove to the Mammoth museum in Hot Springs. Turns out back in the day there was a basin with a sinkhole at the bottom that a bunch of mammoths fell into...fast forward a few million years to present day where the sinkhole now houses at least 61 mammoth fossils.

The next day we moved camp to Angostura lake, we took a dip as soon as we got there and it was so refreshing. Dad and Dawn also let us take the boats out and we kayaked too! We drove over to Wind Cave National Park and did the Wild Cave tour. Basically we crawled through a cave for several hours with knee pads and hard hats. We have never sweat so much, but it was probably the coolest thing we have ever done. It was seriously cool!! After the cave tour we drove around Custer State park and witnessed many more wildlife sightings, including pronghorn antelope, wild burros, and a coyote looking for a prairie dog lunch.

Our greatest encounter was with bison. During our drive, traffic came to a halt. We looked out the window to find about fifty bison strolling around on the road, as if they were the only ones there. We saw and heard them head butt a couple of cars with their horns. Similar to the prairie dog encounter, we were much closer to the bison than we ever expected to be.

On our last evening we topped off our trip with some local culture by watching Brûlé, a modern Native American band, perform live, complete with traditional American Indian regalia and dances.

Thus ends our fun-filled trip to South Dakota with Dad and Dawn. As the Lakota say, it was all washtay!