Snake Creek Recreation Area, South Dakota

Days 8-9; 31 May-June 1, 2021

Snake Creek Recreation Area, South Dakota

We had a beautiful, if long (LONG—520 miles) day of driving, complete with camper tire pressure concerns, on Monday, Memorial Day. We were impressed with the occasional field of solar panels, but moreso with the  lineup of wind turbines on the ridge lines everywhere we drove in Iowa. Iowa was very flat. FLAT. So, a ridge line is not that much of a rise!

South Dakota is flat as well yet our beautiful campsite sits on a rise above the Missouri River. Prettiest site we’ve been on so far, with a nice breeze and a friendly fly who found his way into the RoadHouse and who loves to be right next to us all the time. I named her Fleur. Fleur the Fly.

On Tuesday, we drove up to Mitchell to see the world’s only Corn Palace. Kitschy. I love it.  Also in Mitchell, the Prehistoric Indian Village archeological dig. Both Dan and I said that neither of us was ever personally interested in the field of archeology, but I do have an interest in the lives of Native people. 

How can you not love this South Dakota landscape. That SKY...💜

Game time: how many layers of clouds can YOU find in this photo?
(I call this: “Things the Passenger Sees on Long Driving Days”)

Iowa wind turbines. I wonder if these blades were made by Molded Fiber Glass, headquartered in Ashtabula, OH?
It’s likely these ARE MFG blades, since they have a manufacturing facility in Aberdeen, SD.

What retired life looks like (our site for three nights at Snake Creek Recreation Area).

Our view down to the Missouri River from our site

The World’s Only (remaining) Corn Palace, Mitchell, SD. 500,000 people visit each year. Grain and corn palaces were built in the Midwest to commemorate the harvest and give the local people something to celebrate back in the 1800s, when life was hard.

While the original Corn Palace was built here in Mitchell in 1892; it was rebuilt in 1905 in order to impress the powers that be and hopefully make Mitchell, not Pierre, the state capital of South Dakota. This 1921-2021 century sign commemorates this building with the distinctive onion domes, the third Corn Palace building here in Mitchell.

Native son George McGovern is featured this year, along with the famous (infamous?) Sturgis motorcycle rally. 

While in the past, various artists designed the panels on the Corn Palace, today they are designed by students at Dakota Wesleyan University. Here you see a new panel being installed. It costs $175,000 to replace the pictures on the Corn Palace each year. Bundles of fibers from various grains are used and 11 different colors of corn are grown, each in its own field, to be used in the pictures. (This makes me think of the Rose Parade, only with grains...and on a building!)

More corn pictures inside

Panoramic view of the inside of the Corn Palace. On the basketball court floor was the Corn Palace Gift Shop. The Dakota Wesleyan University Tigers and the Mitchell High School Kernels play their games here. USA Today named this facility one of the ten best in the nation to play HS basketball.
This venue is also used for concerts. From John Philip Sousa to Willie Nelson have played here!

I love the corn mosaic columns in the lobby of the Corn Palace!

We ate lunch at The Depot where I had half of my corned beef sandwich for lunch and the other half came home with me for dinner! I took a photo but decided that depot wasn’t “blog worthy”. 😂
After lunch, I wandered around the local Antique Mall and found a McGovern campaign button for $5 (he was the first person I voted for for president, back in 1972!) and a September 20, 1954 LIFE magazine. Sheesh.

While it may not look like that much on the outside, this is a really nice facility covering over an active archeological excavation site. We visited the Mitchell Prehistory Indian Village and learned about prehistoric people’s migration and habits. 

This sculpture was special for me because of the South Dakota sky reflected in its highly polished surface.

One of the lab classrooms, open to the public, in the excavation site

Bull Boat—I could see my boys making something like this at Gramma and Grampa’s beach!

The active excavation

These people were among the first to plant crops—beans, corn, squashes, amaranth. In addition, they ate deer, buffalo, rabbits, squirrels, etc. Every part of the buffalo was used, even the bone marrow.
 This is the inside of a reproduction house, about 10x20, that would house 10-15 individuals. Its walls were 2 feet thick to keep it cool (relatively) in summer and warmer in the frigid winter weather. Cooking was done over the fire; the smoke went out through the central hole in the roof.
The Mitchell site consists of 45 of this type of dwellings. The community would stay in one spot until they depleted the wood in the area and then follow the rivers to establish another of this type of community of mud dwellings.