August 21st

Yesterday was amazing! And full to the very brim.

We went to see prairie dogs first, and we got to feed them. They looked very much like fat squirrels with small tails. Mom said that she thought they looked like a cross between squirrels and moles. Emmaline very nearly touched one.

Then we went to the Badlands. It was amazing! I don't have pictures, but I'm sure that Dad has posted both pictures and video. We got to walk out on the ridges of rock towers, and climb others. Everything just dropped away so fast! And the rock was soft and crumbly, and if you didn't step just right you'd slip. Walking out in the ridges was so surreal. Normally I'm terrified of even small heights, but the sheer wonder of this excluded fear. Pictures cannot even hope to capture the grandeur I saw.

Then we went to a different place, where we were allowed to climb up the spires. This time, several of the littler kids were allowed to come too, and I was paired with Hudson. For a few minutes he followed me as we climbed, but as he got comfortable he ran ahead. He is smaller and lighter than me, and could go more places and faster than I could. Several times he would run ahead, and not come back when I called him, and stop somewhere. Once I caught up to him, I realized that he was standing at the edge of a drop off hundreds of feet deep. This did scare me, even more than seeing Josiah twenty feet above my head, at the top of a seemingly unscalable spire.

After that, we stopped at one more place where you could look over, but we all stayed on the path this time.

Then we went to Mount Rushmore. The whole way there almost everyone was asleep, exhausted from all of the climbing. We were able to get so close! We had binoculars, but we hardly needed them. We also went to Crazy Horse.

Just now, we went up a overlook road. We hadn't planned to go, but when we saw it we decided that it would be cool. It was terrifying. From where I sit, I couldn't even see the road on the side of the car, just the drop off. At the end of the road is an observation deck, that we just came down off of.

We're safely at the bottom now. At one point we saw a sign that said that we were a mile up. And that point was probably halfway down.