Hello, Black Hills!

Hello, friends! 

Last week, our family took a little family vacation of sorts! My father-in-law wanted to do the Volksmarch, semi-annual hike up to the top of the Crazy Horse memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This was actually a trip that we'd planned on doing in 2020, but, you know... #Pandemic

Since it's about an 8 hour drive out to the Black Hills, we really decided to go for it and try to see everything. This included:

- Wall Drug

- Mount Rushmore (twice)

- Crazy Horse

- The Mammoth Site

- Needles Highway

- Custer State Park

- The Badlands

- Cosmos

- A Gold mine

- Downtown Keystone and Hill City

- The Hotel pool (many times)

It was absolutely jam packed and a ton of fun. Here are my big takeaways: 

- The kids are growing! One of the things that has been great is seeing how much more independent the kids are as they get older. The older two did a great job of entertaining themselves on the long car rides and were able to play well with their cousins. If this trip had been done in 2020 like we'd planned, it would have been WAY more stressful, with three kids ages 5 and under. 

That being said, Jonah is also growing, developmentally, but also physically. The Volksmarch was a 6 mile hike up and back, and while Ezra walked the whole thing (what a champ!) and Thaliea walked most of it, Jonah spent most of his time on my shoulders. Friends, 6 miles, much of which is uphill, with an almost 3 year old on your shoulders is hard work! 

- The Badlands are awesome! It was the last stop on our trip (we caught them on the way home) and we didn't spend more than an hour there, but the Badlands were by far my favorite destination we saw. While not as deep as the Grand Canyon, the Badlands had much of the same features and also included some pretty cool rock formations. I could totally see myself spending a few days backpacking out there. I'll bet it's spectacular at night too. 

- History is complicated. Two of our stops have great historical significance. Mount Rushmore is a tribute to American Exceptionalism and I was a little uncomfortable with the deification of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln during the presentation we saw before the night time lighting of the faces. When you read about the history of how Mount Rushmore came to be, one has to hold both the beauty and the controversy in tension. 

Crazy Horse is also a monument carved in a mountain but with a very different history. Because no federal funds are being used in its construction, and the size of the project, I will almost certainly not see it being completed in my lifetime. Still, as I walked around the museum and learned the monuments history, I couldn't help but remember the fraught history of of broken treaties and broken relations between the United States and the First Nations. 

All in all, it was an amazing trip. Megan did most of the planning and she absolutely crushed it on the logistics side. This is definitely something I could see us doing again the future. 

Have an excellent day!

~Adam