Black Hills and the Badlands

Today was spent touring the country around Rapid City.  Our first port of call was an open range zoo that let us see the locals at closer range.

Next was the Crazy Horse Memorial which is a sort of Mt Rushmore for the Native Americans.
They are carving a MASSIVE statue of Crazy Horse into a mountain.

The project has been going for many years and is nowhere near finished.  His face is there and the rest is being gradually roughed out with dynamite.
Then it was a daytume visit to see Mt Rushmore

and from there out to the Badlands National Park.  This is the eroded remnants of a very ancient aquatic landscape.  The sedimentary layers are a soft muddy consistency and as they are being eroded, many fossils are being revealed.

In this wide and generally flat landscape, during the Cold War the US government placed 450 Minuteman missile installations that could remotely launch nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union.  Some of these silos have been retained as a memorial to this era.