My cycling glasses unexpectedly broke this morning so when I got into Pierre (pronounced “Pier”), I went into the LBS to look for a new pair. They didn’t have any, but I got to talking with a customer named Andy Jackson, who works for the state DOT.

I was asking about where I could get road maps of MN and WI, and Andy gave me the name of the woman at the DOT that has most of the state maps filed away and told me I could pick up a couple for free.

Which all turned out to be true as states have an interest in making their maps available for free – another public good!

Thanks Andy!

This is another sad, woeful little town in the middle of nowhere. Midland has a gas station-convenience store-casino-bar out on the highway and a bar-restaurant downtown over near the grain depot and railroad stop. The sole motel closed down a bit ago, and there is no grocery store anymore either.

We stayed in an apartment in a small complex financed by the USDA that is used by itinerant workers and is managed by the folks at the gas station.

I went down the hill to check out JT’s and walked into another world.

Len was sitting outside struggling to light a cigarette against the same wind I fought coming uphill into town. He looked to be in his mid-30s and must weigh pretty near 300 pounds. While it is a fact that Len does not have his top two front teeth, he was a most companionable conversationalist and I had a good time talking with him.

Len and his older brother and another younger guy deliver hay around the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. They’ve gotten to know a slew of ranchers over the years and branched out into the car crushing business. I am sorry I did not see how this is done, but Len told me that they have some sort of crushing thing that they take around to the ranches where they get the hay because the ranchers always have some old rusting cars that Len and the boys can crush and haul off to a scrap metal yard.

I told him about what Roger and I were doing, and his curious and engaged amazement was touching. He knew he was in bad health and that he would never be able to do what we are doing but he was interested in it and openly wondered what it would be like to be able to do it. Such a journey was a physical frontier well past Len’s ability, but he was intrigued all the same.

We got to talking in the bar, and he insisted on buying me a beer, which turned out to be a Bud Select (which is what, exactly?) because that’s what was cold. Len has kidney stones and gout and must be a prime candidate for diabetes. He controls the gout through diet and told me that eating berries is particularly effective – so much so that he often eats cherry pie filling right out of the can. He’s engaged to a local woman who’s been married three or four times before, and the marriage would be Len’s third and he allows as to how the odds are probably against them.

Len’s crew showed up, and they left, which is how I got to chatting with Kathy, Tammy’s mom, who was tending bar. I learned JT’s originally stood for Jay and Tammy, but they split up (it was her second marriage) so now it’s Just Tammy’s.

Tammy has two kids from each of her marriages and her eighteen-year-old has a little girl so Tammy is a grandmother. They all live with Kathy because once the gas station got a liquor license and started up hot food and drink, business at JT’s, which is off the highway, has fallen off pretty hard.

Later, Roger and I went to JT’s for dinner and I got the chicken breast and “wildass hash browns.”

I will not discuss the wine that we drank nor mention how long the opened bottle had been in the refrigerator; Roger and I have proved capable of more things than you have dreamt Horatio.

In the flesh, Tammy proved to be about the weariest-looking young grandma I’ve ever seen. We tried to engage her and draw her into a little conversation but there was nothing doing. Aside from Kathy, a couple of Tammy’s kids and Cassie, her granddaughter, we were the only ones on the other side of the bar.

This was the brightest thing I saw in the whole town.

Roger’s usual diligence turned up one of the best places to stay on our trip so far. We needed a place northeast of the Badlands that we could get to without biking along the interstate. The solution? Triangle Ranch B&B outside of Philip, SD.

It’s a lovely old Sears home down on the Bad River breaks that has been in Lyndy’s family since it was built. Her great grandparents were homesteaders, which was something that came late to western South Dakota. I’m probably going to get this dates wrong (sorry Lyndy!) but I think her folks came out to the area in 1904(ish). She tells an amazing tale (well, to be fair, both Lyndy and Kenny tell incredible tales at least to the ears of easterners, which upon reflection, is probably something that’s been going on for some 150 years or so) about how the canniness of her great-grandfather in scoping out the land where he wanted to homestead (before the area was opened up to homesteading) was undone by the weather and a crafty local woman. Seems the g-g’father had his eye on a piece of land that he made his peace about with a squatter so he would have clear title once the homesteading would begin and he prepositioned some cottonwood logs there so he could build a house.

Well, he left on account of the winter and the land not yet being open to homesteading, but when he came back, he discovered that the woman who lived downstream of where he was going to build his house had “scooted” his logs down the frozen river. Her response to his indignation was “I didn’t see your brand on the logs.”

Back then that meant that the family lived in a dugout in the ground until a house could be built. That was all fine and good until the heavy rains caused the river to flood in the area where Lyndy’s folks were living. The g-g’father was away at the time and the river was flooding on both sides of the bend and Lyndy’s g-g’ma was in the dugout with the kids as the flood waters were getting ever closer.

Lyndy says her g-g’ma “was not a panicky woman,” and she took the kids in the wagon up to higher ground and they turned the wagon over and stayed underneath it until the rains were over.

And that’s just one tale. Kenny, who at one point was nationally ranked at no. 6 in the bull-riding rodeo circuit, is full of more stories than we had the time to listen to. He’s a great raconteur who blades a mean gravel road and grills a tasty pork chop. You would be hard-pressed to find more gracious and delightful hosts.

They got into the B&B business with the help of a feasibility study done by students at Black Hill State University in Spearfish, and they have carved out a niche for themselves on a ranch that’s been in the family for more than 100 years.

Here’s Lyndy in her kitchen under a picture of herself at four years old when she was competing to be a Sunbeam bread girl:

If you ever go to the Badlands, build in some time and go to Triangle Ranch B&B – hey we went there by bicycle – you will be delighted!

One of our finest days; western South Dakota continues to amaze and impress.

We got up and out early from Wall with the hope of seeing the sun’s light play over the rock formations in the Badlands, but it was overcast for much of the morning – not so good for pictures but great for biking, and because we had the park basically to ourselves for a couple of hours, we declared it a win.

We came in at Pinnacles and took a short ride down a gravel road to the west so we could get our first view from an overlook.

From there we road east on the loop road discovering dramatic changes around each bend.

In places there is vegetation:

But much of it is majestically austere:

I don’t have much of a handle on the geology, but part of what sets the Badlands apart from other stunning formations in the west is that in addition to fossilized soils (which are the reds and yellows) much of it is clay formed from volcanic ash. So it is softer than other landscapes and it is continually being reshaped.

There are a couple of vast prairie dog towns in the park, and when you stop to check them out there is a great commotion of chattering and diving into holes that is very amusing despite the fact that they are plague-ridden vermin.

The view to the south looks out to the Yellow river valley:

The view to the north is all prairie, a vestige of the grasslands that covered some 40% of the continent:

On the way out of the park, we stopped for a short hike through the “wall” that runs south to north on the eastern edge. The landscape on the other side is barren and beautiful.

It was a great day amid some wondrous natural beauty:

And, finally, here’s a 360-degree video from outside the Badlands Wall (there’s some kids shouting and toward the end as I’m thinking the file size is getting too big, the pacing gets a bit vertiginous).