The Corn Palace
The World’s Only Corn Palace is Mitchell’s premier tourist attraction. Some 500,000 tourists come from around the nation each year to see the uniquely designed corn murals. Eight years before the turn of the 20th century, in 1892, the World's Only Corn Palace was established on the city’s Main Street. Today, the Corn Palace is more than the home of the festival or a point of interest of tourists. The Palace is redecorated each year with naturally colored corn and other grains and native grasses to make it “the agricultural show-place of the world”. They currently use 13 different colors or shades of corn to decorate the Corn Palace: red, brown, black, blue, white, orange, calico, yellow and now we have green corn! A different theme is chosen each year, and murals are designed to reflect that theme. Ear by ear the corn is nailed to the Corn Palace to create a scene. The decorating process usually starts in late May with the removal of the rye and dock. The corn murals are stripped at the end of August and the new ones are completed by the first of October. A word of note, in July of this year (2017) the main street off I-90 was completely torn up, and difficult to navigate. “You must endeavor to preserve”.

DIGNITY
The next stop was a discovery. A 50 foot high stainless steel statue on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River near Chamberlain, SD. The statue is of an Indigenous woman in a Plains style dress receiving a star quilt, the quilt held by the woman has more than 100 blue diamond shapes that move in the wind "like an Aspen leaf”. The name of the sculpture called DIGNITY. According to the artist, the sculpture honors the cultures of the Lakota and Dakota peoples of SD, and boldly proclaims they are alive and standing with dignity.
Continuing west on I-90 we stopped at the Minuteman Missile NHS site and the Badlands NP

Minuteman Missile NHS
During the Cold War, a vast arsenal of nuclear missiles were placed in the Great Plains. Hidden in plain sight, for thirty years 1,000 missiles were kept on constant alert; hundreds remain today. The Minuteman Missile remains an iconic weapon in the American nuclear arsenal. It holds the power to destroy civilization, but is meant as a nuclear deterrent to maintain peace and prevent war.

Badlands NP

Badlands National Park was established in 1939 and was created to preserve the scenic and scientific value of a portion of the White River Badlands. Natural processes are displayed as a concentrated collection of rutted ravines, serrated towers, pinnacles, and precipitous gulches. The variable climate of the Badlands can be unpredictable and extreme with temperatures ranging from -40°F to 116°F. Summers are hot and dry with occasional violent thunderstorms. For eleven thousand years, American Indians have used this area for their hunting grounds The Badlands NP, protects 242,756 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires blended with the largest undisturbed mixed grass prairie in the United States.

The Badlands NP was on our northern route to Tucson. After stopping at the Minuteman Missile NHS, the entrance to Badlands NP is just on the other side of I-90. We entered the park on the eastern end, the Ben Reifel Visitor’s Center entrance and followed the Loop Road to the Pinnacles entrance, on the western end. It was more than 35 years since I visited the Park and I remembered nothing about it.

Since Joyce and I are both amateur photographers, we stopped about every half mile to see and photograph the beautiful changing scenery. After another hour, the scenery was still awesome, but not changing much, and it was early afternoon and getting hot. We continued west and viewed more overlooks from the sanctity of the air conditioning in the truck. We found one overlook, name not known, that presented an opportunity to photograph a panorama of rock formations which showed the various colors of the strata. By the time this “shoot” was over, the outside temperature was 108º F. It was time to head west and south to Custer. Outside of Rapid City, we could see Mount Rushmore in the distance.