The plains aren't so innocent...

minuteman missile

peering down into a missile silo

seemingly doomed herd of cattle

The high plains apparently served as a good location for intercontinental ballistic missile silos because the ground elevation there would have saved a lot of launch energy and flight time for the missiles. Advancements in nuclear weapon technology have rendered most of the silos (constructed in the 1960s) obsolete, but the one pictured above has been converted into the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. The tiny museum with a short film occupies a trailer, but the silo is well worth stopping to peer into.

The missile in that silo would have reached its targeted communities in 30 minutes. 30 minutes says two things: 1) the missiles are very fast, and 2) the population of families, cooks, farmers, steelworkers, students, prisoners, office workers, nurses, artists, criminals, bartenders, hairdressers, and street vendors, etc. making their livings in the areas targeted are in so many ways very close to us -just over the horizon.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #9: missile silo

A missile silo is an underground, vertical cylindrical container for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). They typically have the missile some distance under the surface, protected by a large "blast door" on top.

-Wikipedia

Superstorm

advancing storm over western South Dakota

advancing storm over a gas station

advancing storm reaching for a pickup truck

The storm that loomed in from the west threatened us through much of western South Dakota. Once we got back onto the interstate toward Wyoming the speed limit let us accelerate to 80+ miles per hour. It was like leaving the dark basement as a kid: if you walk calmly, the basement doesn't scare you, but if you start to run you get goosebumps and freak out and run faster. This storm reached out its tentacles as soon as we started running.

Mammatus clouds

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

As we left the Badlands we were headed for an approaching storm that darkened the western sky. These mammatus (mammary for obvious reasons) clouds, when appearing underneath cumulonimbus clouds as shown above, are a sign of a particularly violent (and possibly tornadic) thunderstorm. A weather professor in college once told me he refused to board a plane when he saw these outside an airport in Colorado Springs. The flight was later cancelled.

Scenic overlook

approaching storm

Badlands National Park

looking east beyond "the wall"

scenic overlook

I like to imagine how the above photograph turned out. Wherever it's being displayed now, instead of showing what the badlands look like, it tells the story of that family's visit there together in the summer of 2009.

I remember growing up reliving vacations and events by looking through all the photo albums my mom put together. As I grew older my own memory of our vacations blended with the story contained in those pictures until I could no longer distinguish between them. The blurring doesn't matter -each enhances the other.

(By the way, I think the railings designed for safety should also be designed with personal photos like this one in mind.)