Missiles, Malls and Badlands
Trip Start
Sep 23, 2010
1
155
366
Trip End
Jul 13, 2012
Wall, South Dakota
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Once we'd fueled up, we headed out on the I-90 in the direction of the Minuteman Missile National Historical Site to see if we could get on a tour. Unfortunately, we missed the last one by an hour or so, so we got the times for tomorrow and headed off down the Badlands National Park scenic route. After flashing our pass, we headed in to the site and had a look at the American Badlands. I have to say that the US does do everything on the larger side. The Badlands are no exception and are much bigger than the Canadian ones we saw. We spent a few hours driving round looking at them and around 6pm we stopped at a picnic site to cook dinner. After dinner we headed out catching a few mountain goats on the way and drove on to a city called Wall. Wall home of Wall Drug! A massive department store with a bit of everything including a T-rex that looks for food every 12mins, a giant 6 foot bunny with horns and more western themes that you could shake a stick at. After a wander round we found a nice parking spot in one of Wall Drugs car parks and settled in for the night.
5th Aug.
Got up early at 7am from our Wall Drug car park and drove straight out to the Delta-9 missile silo. After looking at the training missile down in the silo, we carried on down to the National Park HQ to get tickets for the underground launch control centre. Even though we arrived 5mins after they opened, we had to wait until 9.30am as the first tour was fully booked already! Still, it gave us time to have breakfast in the van and have a look at the video before heading out to the control centre. Just after 9am we drove back out onto I-90 and at the next exit drove down a gravel road to the control centre. As was the silo, it was all properly locked behind a fence and gate where we were met by a park ranger who took us on our tour, spot on 9.30am. It was quite a cool experience seeing inside and we even got to go down in the lift to the launch control room 31ft below the surface. Once our tour was over, we headed back out on the highway towards Mitchell.
