The mid-west part of our trip is focused less on art and architecture and more on the great outdoors.  We have visited a number of natural, and unnatural, i.e., man made, wonders.  The natural include the Badlands of South Dakota and the Devils Tower in Wyoming where we had a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. The manmade wonders were Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorials.  We also took the time to visit Deadwood, SD where Wild Bill Hickcock was killed holding a poker hand of aces and eights, now known as the Dead Man's Hand, and toured a "Little House on the Prairie", aka, the 1906 sod house which was the center of the 160 acre homestead of the Brown family who came to South Dakota as part of a government program intended to attract settlers to this rather desolate part of the world.

One of the many impressive formations that make up the Badlands of South Dakota

Another view of the Badlands

Laura Ingalls Wilder, looking an awful lot like BJ, in front of the Brown prairie home

The magnificent sculptures on Mount Rushmore

Another view of Mount Rushmore

 

 

 

 

 

 

The unfinished Crazy Horse Memorial - the head seen in profile above is 87 feet high (the heads on Mount Rushmore are 60 feet high)

The model for the Crazy Horse memorial - it should look something like this in another 20 or 30 years.

We took this photo - it's not a still shot from Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Detail of the rock formation that make up the Devils Tower