Petrified Wood

20090830 -- Petrified Wood

I walked the periphery of Indian Ridge Campground before departing for Mobridge. There I squatted on some motel's WiFi for a while and send the blogs that had accumulated and checked email. Crossing the bridge over the Missouri (mid span) brought me into the Mountain Time zone. I wished Tim had been with me to observe the event.

15 minutes along US12 brought me to the turn off for the Sitting Bull Memorial. That is a pedestal topped with a bust of Sitting Bull. Nothing else except a short 300 word history of that great man. It is on a high point overlooking the river and the plains near the place where he was born. Apparently, per a brochure at Indian Ridge CG, there is a non-profit attempting to raise money for a visitor center, but there was no sign of that at the memorial itself.

On the road, ~another hour brought me to McLaughin. There the Grain Growers Union dominates the town. There was some activity, although limited by this being Sunday. I watched four 18 wheeler size trucks disappear into the elevator buildings, then emerge empty to be weighed again. On the adjacent tracks a quarter mile of grain hopper cars were being shunted in, and an engine was left attached to move them along to the next ones could get in position. It looked like they could load 2 cars at once. There was also a very large pile of grain heaped outside, I think from the harvest last year, since it had some greenish discoloration, but I could not get close enough to this to look at it closely. The pile was perhaps 500 yards long, with a triangular cross section perhaps 40 feet high at the top. Later, some miles farther along US12 I saw a combine harvesting a large field, and got some photos as it neared the end of a pass and turned around for another.

In mid afternoon I pulled off US12 at Lemmon, looking for a grocery story. Across the street from that there is a square block comprising the worlds largest petrified wood collection and historical museum. There are a couple of ~8 foot long petrified logs, dozens of stumps, dozens of obelisks built from smaller pieces, a museum building with exterior walls built of this, complete with 'petrified mud' flooring including petrified or fossil grass or reed imprints, a gift shop, some rocks with signage claiming that the slash marks or grooves they showed were dinosaur claw marks, a few dinosaur bones, and a whole lot of of other marvels. The museum was two rooms each the size of Janski's store containing a lot of donated items, both natural history and old timey stuff from the Native Americans and settlers.

Crops in this area are wheat, sunflowers, corn, oats. All of the straw is baled for sale. A lot of hay, in the same large barrel shaped bales as well, from smaller fields and ditches that do not permit use of the big rigs used for the other crops. I think some hay also comes from lands that have grassland conservation easements, that permit a cutting after mid July when, supposedly, the birds have finished nesting. After an area of rolling hills near the Missouri, the land is way flat and open.

I saw a US Forest Service Ranger station on the outskirts of Lemmon, closed for Sunday. I'll return tomorrow to get info on the National Grasslands they administer. In the meantime, I headed 12 miles South of town for an evening at the Shadehill Recreation Area administered by South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks (a State Park).

No cell coverage here.