We enjoyed our stay at Split Rock Creek State Park. The park had completely filled up for Memorial Day weekend. Being the biggest rig in the park, it's tough for us to sneak out of a campground. I bet the other campers were wondering why we were pulling out on the Saturday morning of the holiday weekend. When we were making reservations for this part of the trip back in early March, we were unable to get a site for the whole weekend but could get it through Friday night. Fortunately we had found a site in the town of Mitchell South Dakota that did have availability starting Saturday for five nights which would get us through the holiday and beyond.
Mitchell is about 111 miles west on I-90 and was an easy drive until we got close. For some reason the Garmin RV760 GPS didn’t want us to go through town and instead routed us up and around town along some farm roads that while paved were rather narrow. In any event we made it to a rather crowded campground. The host brought us around to our pull thru full hookup site but it took us right by the crowded playground. I wasn’t positive I wasn’t going to drive over a kid’s bike that was left hazardously close to the road. As we settled in, I suspect most of our neighbors were wondering why we were coming in on the Saturday of the holiday weekend.
Mitchell is a reasonable sized town of 15K people or so. A town this size has multiple grocery shopping options and even a Jeep dealer which should allow me to get some service done that didn’t happen in Sioux Falls at our last stop. Of course the real “draw” for this town (and possibly the only draw) is the one and only Corn Palace. We had heard about this place over the years and kind of have a preconceived idea of what to expect although I hadn’t done any real investigation beforehand. Since it was a pleasant, late afternoon, we drove into town to see what all the buzz was about. We were only able to check out the exterior at this time of day, but the lighting from the low sun was pleasant and there wasn’t much of a crowd.
The 2018 Corn Palace Salute to Military
The Side View
Another Side Shot
I won’t say I was underwhelmed but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I’m not sure why, but I was expecting the place to somehow be constructed of corn! So to find a building that is simply decorated with corn, didn’t fit my expectations. Of course a building constructed of corn would have a very limited lifespan and wouldn’t be very useful beyond the novelty factor, so this was a much more plausible approach. In my prior life, I was an image scientist (or at least that was my job title), so I was able to appreciate the skill it must take to work with the very limited color palette that corn provides but still produce images that look rather impressive from a distance. Even up close, I was rather amazed with the intricacy of the design.
The Namesake of the State
On our first full day here, we were to have a non-rainy day which seems to be a rarity this year. We get the bikes out to ride around Lake Mitchell. It’s not a long ride - about 9 miles. There are portions where they have actual off road trails for mountain biking but with all the rain they have had, at each and every off-road section, we discover muddy or flooded trails so we decide to stick to the roads. There is barely any traffic and at a few points there are even designated paved bike lanes. Lake Mitchell is formed from the spillway placed along Firesteel Creek. With all the rain they have had over the past weeks, the creek was under a flood watch and the water flowing over the spillway was rather impressive. They had some of the better viewing spots roped off due to the high water but I did get some pictures and a video showing the power of water.
Lake Mitchell Spillway at Distance
Spillway Close Up
From the Bridge
Video of Spillway in Action
We did make it back to the Corn Palace while it was open in order to see the inside. The place is normally the basketball court for the local team but during the off-season, it is turned into a corn palace memorabilia store. While not everything being sold had a corn theme, a good 90% of it did. We didn’t find anything we couldn’t live without. There is a video talking about the history of the place and all sorts of photos hanging around the building with one hallway showing the design from each and every year. There are also some of the artwork showing how the designs are created for the workers to the next install. It’s kind of like a giant paint by number design but the paint and brush are replaced by corn cobs and a nail gun. The murals on the inside of the building obviously don’t weather as quickly but the guide did say that they are redone with the same pattern every 8 to 10 years to keep them looking fresh.
The Obligatory Photo
Corn Art Over Stage
We're Heading to Mt Rushmore
Panning for Gold?
Closeup of Grasses
Fairytale Theme Drawings
Overlooking the Gift Shop
Waves of Corn
Corner Shot
We ended up having a rainy night that continued on into Memorial Day itself. This tended to get these weekend (fair weather) campers out of the place rather early and then we nearly had the campground to ourselves. There is a huge Cabela's store in town and we did need to get a few things so we had a rather lazy day of shopping and lunch at a nearby restaurant. On Tuesday, the weather improved by not raining. While investigating our route west of here, I had stumbled upon the South Dakota Tractor Museum in Kimball South Dakota. It wasn’t clear from the aerial whether we would be able to stop here with our motorhome towing the Jeep as we drive by in a few days. It was about 50 miles or so west of us but we seem to be running out of things to see and do in Mitchell for the five nights we are here. So we make a day trip to Kimball to look at old tractors. On our way there, we stop at a rest area on I-90 to eat our lunch and find a geocache. We also find there is a small chapel similar to the one we had just visited in western Minnesota.
Small Chapel in Rest Area
At the tractor museum, there are six buildings on the property and we head into the first one where we are greeted by two volunteers. We have a nice chat with them and the man says he needs to repair a window so he will take us to another building and gives us all sorts of info about the various tractors. We are in charge of turning the lights on and off so they don’t waste electricity. There are definitely some old tractors but most of them are in excellent shape. Having had 2 John Deere tractors over the years, I am a little partial to those. One of the buildings had five of them from the same family - a 430, 530, 630, 730 and 830. There are plenty other brands represented but the Cockshutt was very nicely restored. It probably runs too but would be a shame to get it dirty.
Old Oliver Tractor
John Deere Lineup
Nicely Restored Cockshutt Tractor
Minneapolis-Moline Tricycle Tractor
There are lots of other old things beyond tractors or the implements for them. Several cars are part of the collection. A Model T, a Kaiser with a bison logo and a really nice Austin Healey Sprite that I was tempted to take for a spin. They have a one room schoolhouse that has lots of the old desks and books. Some of the desks looked just like the ones we had at my grade school fifty years ago. I definitely appreciated the old movie theater film projector. I had a coworker back in Rochester that could likely tune this thing back into working order. Possibly the scariest thing there was the ladies electric hair curling machine. It looked more like a torture device.
Model T
One Room Schoolhouse Interior
Love the Kaiser Logo
Nice Wooden Cash Register circa 1910
Austin Healey Sprite
Brenkert Movie Film Projector
South Dakota License Plates Over the Years
Old Washing Machine (like mom had!) and Electric Curling Maching
Painted Horse
The next day was another rainy one so I took the Jeep in for service. We took a drive south of town to Dimock. There is a cheese shop there that had decent reviews. They have just built and moved into a new building. They had lots of cheese samples sitting out and we found a few we really liked. I’m partial to cheese curds and they can be hard to find in much of the country. They have lots to choose from so I get some plain cheddar and some habanero curds. Both were excellent and the hot ones were truly hot. We stopped by the Corn Palace one last time on the way back to camp. They had started to remove some of the dried grasses around the border of one of the murals. Since the materials are natural, they need to put the replacements up when they become available. The ears of corn will take another month or two assuming the farmers get dry enough weather to even plant the fields. We enjoyed our visit to Mitchell but in retrospect, a five night stay was a little more than was needed.
Given all the wet weather this part of the country has been having, I suppose it’s not too unexpected to have a rainy day to drive from Sloan Iowa to our next stop in Minnesota. Split Rock Creek State Park is in southwestern Minnesota near the town of Jasper. It’s a relatively easy 155 mile drive up I-29 into South Dakota and then back east. As we have been driving through Iowa, we have started to see our first billboards for Wall Drug in Wall South Dakota. When I noticed the first one, I had Chris check to see how far away we are from Wall. At the time, it was about 435 miles! We will be heading near there in the next couple weeks and will likely see several hundreds of these billboards as we head west along I-90.
We arrive on a Sunday afternoon and nobody is working the office. It’s a small park with less than 30 campsites. We have a site reserved but the sites don’t have water so we drive the car back to the camping loop to determine where we might fill up for our six night stay. The place is practically empty with only two trailers still there and one of those is the campground host. We get water and back into our site. Our neighbor, the host, comes over to welcome us while we are setting up. It has been a very wet spring and a few trees in the surrounding sites have started to uproot and a tree removal crew will be showing up Monday morning. Fortunately none of the trees around our site are involved so we should be okay other than the potential for early morning chainsaw noise.
That first night we had a frost warning and woke up to a chilly 34 degrees outside! Mother Nature has a strange sense of humor with Memorial Day just a few days away. That first morning, the park ranger came to check us in. Turns out there is a day use fee of $7 per day on top of the camping fee since we have two vehicles! It was cheaper to buy an annual state park pass than the day use fee for our 6 nights.
On our drive to Split Rock Creek just north of Jasper, we had noticed a property with a large number of windmills on it. Not the commonplace wind turbines for electric generation but old style windmills that may have been seen on farms in the past. The little we can find about the place, sounds like it is on a person’s private property but visitors are permitted to wander the grounds. Apparently the man’s wife wanted a windmill on the property and he ended up becoming obsessed with them. We drive there and park near the large outbuilding. There are easily three dozen windmills with the majority of them being different designs and styles of windmills. There was a slight breeze that made a few of them spin.
Windmills Galore
Montgomery Wards Company Windmill
Southern Cross
Even More
Twin Windmill
Interesting Design
Reflecting Pond
Windmill Driven Sawmill
There are definitely some unique designs and all of them seem to be refurbished and in excellent shape. Across the road is a field with a herd of cattle grazing and scattered in with them are a large number of old windmill towers and parts. This guy seems to have a couple dozen more that might get repaired and erected someday. Nobody seemed to be home, so we didn’t get a chance to ask any questions but we did spend more than an hour just marveling at them all. We noticed a few of them have the blades chained to prevent them from turning. In one case it was attached to a sawmill with exposed blade. Probably wise to keep that one from spinning. This was definitely an unexpected bonus of this camping stop.
Unique
Iron Turbine
Wooden Windmill
Are We in Holland?
Windmill Drives Pump to Turn Water Wheel
Cattle Interspersed with Windmill Parts
Remember how I mentioned how wet the weather has been and how soft the ground was? Well, we noticed that the motorhome, which had been nice and level after setting up, was no longer level. I tried lowering the front jacks some more to remedy the situation but only heard a strange noise from the front hydraulic jacks. I head out to discover the two front jacks have compressed the gravel on our site and are now buried about 9 inches below the surface of the ground!
Buried Jack! (Pad is 10" diameter)
The problem is that the jacks are driven down by hydraulics but only come up by the two springs. Even when we are on concrete, sometimes the jacks need a little assistance to come back up to the travel mode. I was figuring I would need to somehow dig out around the jacks but didn’t see how I could with the coach sitting so close to the ground. The sides of the holes had not completely caved in so I sprayed the cylinders with WD40 and pushed the “store” button while crossing my fingers. To my utter amazement, the jacks came back up bringing a little bit of the gravel along for the ride. The camp host went up to get a couple buckets of gravel and I pulled the rig forward and filled in all the holes. Even the rear tires had sunk in an inch or two. I pulled out all the pads we normally only use on very unlevel sites and backed onto them since I knew more rain was on the way before we were to leave. Then I used a couple of 3 foot long 2 by 12’s under the front jacks. Everything stayed level and had no problems upon our departure.
Just north of us in the town of Pipestone is a National Monument. Pipestone National Monument isn’t named after the town but rather the town is named after the type of rock found in this area. Pipestone or catlinite is a reddish rock that the local indians have quarried for centuries to carve into lots of things but most predominantly into ceremonial pipes. The national monument was created back in 1937 but to this day, local indians are permitted to quarry the stone for their craft. Apparently the stone is relatively easy to carve with standard hand tools. While we didn’t get to see any actual work being done in the quarry, the video did a nice job explaining the history of the area and how the stone is quarried and shaped into pipes and other elaborate pieces.
To get to the pipestone, the topsoil is removed then many feet of other (undesirable) rock needs to be removed until the layers of pipestone is I covered. The remarkable aspect of all this work is how it is done all by hand with shovels, pick axes and crowbars. At first I assumed that the reason for this manual process was more of a spiritual or religious nature but in talking with one of the artisans working inside the studio area, he said that blasting or using any heavy machinery tends to shatter the pipestone making it useless. There are many beautiful pieces on display with all a lot of them for sale to the general public. While they are nice, we really don’t have room to be carrying rocks around in the motorhome.
Pipestone Samples
Ornate Pipestone
Beautiful Stone Carving
There is a walkway that loops around the area outside. The ranger had warned us that the bridge at the far end of the loop had been knocked off its foundation during a spring flood so it really isn’t a loop until it gets repaired. The loop was short enough that we just walked both halves of it. This was an interesting stop and we even learned a few things.
Fast Flowing Creek
Waterfall
Native Prayer Cloths Tied to Trees
Panoramic View
We got a bit of a walk in around Split Rock Creek late in the afternoon since there was a storm coming thru and the next day was to be rainy with high winds. There is a dam at the one end of the creek forming the lake that would get used if the weather wasn’t so crappy. On the rainy day, I drove into Sioux Falls SD planning to get a haircut and an oil change. It was quite a windy drive and was quite glad I didn’t have to be driving the motorhome. The Jeep dealer had a long line and when I asked about getting in, they told me their computer system was down and they were unable to do any work. I went to get a haircut next and had better luck. I tried the dealership again about an hour later and they were still down and might be up this afternoon or tomorrow morning! I decided not to wait and headed back to camp to see if any more trees had been uprooted in the windstorm. The following day had less wind but was still rainy so not much sightseeing was attempted.
Delicate Flower
Bridge Downstream of Dam
Dam at Split Rock Creek
Our last two days turned out to be fairly pleasant and we had this Minnesota State Park Pass that was itching to get used before we head out of the state. Blue Mounds State Park isn’t too far away and we had almost booked the campground there instead but at the time, Blue Mounds was without water and it wasn’t clear if or when it might be restored. We drove through the campground and it looked reasonable and we could have fit into many of the spots. But we had come here for two things: a hike and the hopes of seeing bison. They have about 100 bison on the prairies within the park. We first head to the observation platform but they were all quite a distance away. We were able to count about 55 of them in the nearest herd but another herd was visible even further out but too far to count.
Distant Bison
We figure we would get our hike in with the hopes we may get closer to them or they will move closer to us. We start out on the Upper Cliffline Trail for about a mile before doing some switchbacks to the Lower Cliffline Trail. This trail is also a paved bike loop but alas our bikes are back at camp. After a little bit, we head up the Bur Oak Trail which works it’s way about halfway between the upper and lower trails before arriving at the southern visitor building. There is an old rock quarry along the way and the climb is a little bit of a workout. The visitor center was closed and based on its look, it’s unclear whether it is still being used and just too early in the season for it to be open. The building’s design was quite interesting since it appears to be built into the side of a cliff and may even use the cliff as the back wall of the building?
View of Cliff
Mile Markers Along Bike Path
Rock Climbing Anyone?
Old Stone Quarry
South Visitor Center at Blue Mounds SP
Building Merges Into Cliff
On the way back we follow the Mound Trail which is adjacent to the bison prairie. In season, the park has a large off-road vehicle to take people on tours out into the prairie. It’s only $10 per person for a 90 minute tour. They apparently follow a route as opposed to just heading toward a herd of bison but it might have been a fun thing to try but Memorial Day is still a couple days away. Our loop worked out to be about 4.5 miles. When we got back to the car and had lunch, we attempted to do another trail on the north side of the park but didn’t get too far before finding the trail closed and under reconstruction after a washed out bridge. Heading out, there was a lone bison near the viewing platform but as soon as we got out of the car to see if others were nearby, it wandered off apparently camera shy. We did some detours driving back to camp and came across a tiny roadside chapel. It was open and may be able to hold a dozen people at best.
Camera Shy Bison
Waterfall at Blue Mounds
Tiny Chapel
The next day we head northeast to Camden State Park. They have lots of hiking trails but the park ranger warns us that many of them are flooded or quite wet. Her recommendation was the Dakota Valley Trail being at higher elevation, it was probably the driest hike as long as you like some climbing. It was a nice walk that was about 2.5 miles long. We have noticed “Hiking Club” signs along some of the trails in the few Minnesota state parks but it wasn’t clear what they were used for. The one on this trail even provided a password. Maybe to prove we were there?
Waterfall at Camden SP
Password for Hikers
We had brought along our bicycles and cycling gear with the plan to ride the Camden Regional Bike Trail. It’s a 10 mile, paved path from Camden SP up to the town of Marshall MN. We only knew about the bike path from the dozens of geocaches hidden along the path. It had turned into a nice day after starting out cloudy and looking like rain. We changed into our cycling clothes and headed out after lunch. There was a serious hill getting from our parking spot up to the trail but the trail itself had mostly gentle rolling hills. A few miles into the ride, we realized we had the benefit of a pretty strong tailwind. Chris was willing to continue a bit further but convinced her it may be wise to turn around sooner than we had planned. We ended up getting in a 14 mile ride.
Trains Passes Us on Bike Path
Birds Waiting for the Mail
By the time we arrived back at the campground, it was just about full. Of course is was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend so it might be expected. This turned out to be a nice stop and did get us one more state in our count of states we have camped in. We realize there is much more to see in the state of Minnesota but this will need to suffice for now and we will work in an extended stay to the state during some future travels. Now it’s off to South Dakota for nearly a month.
