Blue Mounds State Park

This morning, Greg and I took the Prairie and Bison Bus Tour at Blue Mounds State Park.

I learned some pretty cool facts on the tour:

• The prairie needs to be burned every few years to keep it healthy and prevent it from evolving. People have been burning prairies for thousands of years.
• No bison currently living in the US is purebred due to cattle/bison inbreeding many years ago by ranchers.
• Only 4% of the original long grass prairie remains in the U.S.
• The soil that makes up the prairie of Blue Mounds State Park is at most 3 ft. deep. Underneath the soil is up to 350 ft of Sioux quartzsite. Because of that, the root system goes sideways rather than down.
• Bison like to hang out together, so it is rare to find one on its own.
• The various parks that breed bison swap the bulls between them in order to prevent too much inbreeding.

We saw some cool wildlife on our tour, too. Thanks to another woman on the tour, who had a powerful set of binoculars, we got to see a red tail hawk and a falcon. We also got to see some pheasants.

Palisades State Park

Next, we headed to Palisades State Park. This was a cute park with some beautiful quartzsite cliffs along Split Rock Creek.

I could post about 20 pictures from this park. I thought it was beautiful.

One more photo, just because.

Falls Park

Next, we headed to Falls Park in downtown Sioux Falls.

The feels-like temp today was between 100 and 103 degrees, despite the cloud cover (humidity over 70 percent), and Greg was beat by this point, so he took a little convincing to keep going. But after a short stint in the air-conditioned camper, he was game.

And in the end, we were both glad that we went. Wow. Falls Park was a pleasant surprise!

It’s a wonderful community park with a water playground for kids, shops, picnic areas, and restaurants. But the highlight of the park is the falls.

You don’t see something like this right in the heart of a city very often. It was very cool. (By the way, that building is a cafe.)

Miscellany

Some observations about Wisconsin and South Dakota:

• The names of county roads in Wisconsin are letters of the alphabet (e.g. County Road V, County Road E). In South Dakota, the names of county roads are numbers (e.g. County Road 478, County Road 452).
• The roads are so straight!
• The fields of crops (corn or soybeans) are so vast that they disappear into the horizon. It’s all farmland here.

• People in South Dakota say hi to you when walking past you.
• The roads in Wisconsin are in terrible condition. So are a lot of the roads in South Dakota. Even I-90, which is a major highway!
• The roads in South Dakota are sparsely traveled. We went nearly 20 miles today and only passed one other car.

• We’ve been feeling a bit like we’re driving across the top of the world, even though our elevation is only 1200 ft. above sea level. I think it’s because the landscape is so flat that the horizon is very far away.