South Dakota

With our tour of the Midwest wrapped up, John and I headed to South Dakota for some camping, biking, and relaxing.

We started in Badlands National Park.  After hours of driving through the vast plains of South Dakota, this rocky park jutted out of the horizon, seemingly out of nowhere.  It’s a beautiful park, with a nice campground right in the heart of the scenery.

A little self-portrait goodness. (This is very hard with a heavy DSLR.  John’s head doesn’t normally look that distorted, its the wide angle of the lens.  Just in case you were worried.)

After photographing people for so many years, my first instinct when I see a beautiful landscape is to insert a couple/family/bride and groom into it.  So I set the camera settings, handed it off to John, and inserted myself into the scenery.  Doing wheel pose, of course.  I’ll have to brush up on my badass yoga poses for future scenic photos…

Unfortunately, there were 30mph winds and an overnight temperature in the 30s.  After one night camping here, we decided tent life just wasn’t in the cards.

So we bailed on camping, checked in at an inexpensive hotel in Rapid City and spent the day enjoying the monuments of the Black Hills.

Mt Rushmore, in all its glory.

Below is Crazy Horse, which is unfinished and truly fascinating.  The scale of it is monumental (a 10 story building could fit in that tunnel you see), and a single family has been working on it for nearly 65 years.  While they’ve made a lot of progress, it still doesn’t look even halfway complete.  If and when they do manage to complete it, Crazy Horse will be the largest statue in the world, and incredibly impressive.

The chilly, windy weather and John’s developing cold sent us retreating from the Black Hills back to Colorado.  We’re currently hiding out in Granby, Colorado, enjoying having a little studio apartment in the mountains all to ourselves and getting some work done.

Next week we’re heading back to Denver for the ramp up to my sister’s wedding, and to visit my kitty (who has been staying with my parents.)  If you are in Denver and want to see us, now is your chance!