Yellowstone trip

Ok so nothing to do right now It's early Sunday morning...the one before Memorial day 2011.....we are camped at our first stop in the Black Hills...Hermosa ..16 miles from Rapid City...here for 18 nights....there is a bunch of stuff to do and see here hence the long stop over....we left the Badlands Friday and that was sad as the 11 nights there besides the few days we lost due to bad weather was just about as awesome as you can get....I loved the area...guess so did Rose....we finally did the 4 mile loop hike named the Castle trail...plus with run offs from the main loop hiked almost 9 miles that day....thankfully the weather was great...

While in the badlands we visited the Minuteman missile contole center and the miniteman silo...just in case you know nothing about these missiles..they were dotted around South Dekota in the 60's....of course at that time aimed at Russia...they built 150 missile silos and 10 contole centers all in 2 yrs, the contole centers were extremily secure...with massive blast doors that you can see in the pics I've uploaded, the launch room was underground and actually built to with stand most of what Russia could of sent over in retaliation, this room was built on 4 large shock obsorbers enabling it to move obsoving any blast.......each of these missiles was capable of flying 5000 miles in half an hour and delivering a payload of something close to the power of the Horoshima bomb each ...hmmm although never fired they were capable of being launched in minutes...hence the name.....they are now decommisioned however and, as everything they have now upgraded missiles.....

Yesterday here we drove to Rapid City in the morning for supplies...in the pm drove through Custer park were all the Buffalo are.....and also part of the Blackhills...main reason was a scouting trip really just to gather maps for hiking from the visiter centers....there is a memorial in the Black hills called Crazy horse...if you are unaware of this as I was untill recently hopefully you will be as pleasantly surprised as I was.....we've all heard of Mount Rushmore...(another site on our long list to see...) (which is about 40 miles away from our camp site) Crazy horse was started about 27 years ago by a sculpture...this memorial when finish (if) is going to be gigantic....right now after 27 years they have managed to sculpt most of Crazy horse's face into the side of a mountain...the scupture has him sat on his horse and if you ever get to see the finished project model as we did and the amount of work already done ...you will get the feeling of the monumentous task to finish this project...the sculpture now has his children helping and actually are doing a rock blast this Monday (tomorrow) so we may go and watch if it goes ahead ....we intend to also visit this next week end as every year they allow people to hike up the 3 mile trail actually walking on the cut away that is going to end up being his arm reaching out in front of him...really really looking forward to doing that.....

Today however it's raining and any thoughts of doing some hiking in the Black hills is being washed out as I write.....