Rapid City, South Dakota

Mark and I had the great privilege of spending the last week in SD with Paul Kind and his girlfriend, Brooke Smith. I couldn't get the pic of all of us to load, so sorry Brooke! We had a blast...it was such a relaxing vacation. We got to hang out and see some sites and we came home refreshed with some great memories and shared experiences. Check out some pics below!

Mark, Paul and I on top of Harney Peak...the high point of South Dakota.

Mark and I at Harney Peak. It's a quick walk up that you can do in about a couple hours.

Yep...Rapid City is just minutes away from Mt. Rushmore. It looks a lot like it does in every picture, but it was really cool to see the little video on how it was made. Can you imagine trying to scuplt a mountain?!

Another mountain sculpture called "Crazy Horse." It's named after a Lakota Indian and will eventually look like the white sculpture. It probably won't be done for like another 300 years because it's all privately funded. If you look closely you can see that the face is done. Another fact to note is that it's the largest sculpture in the world. Mt. Rushmore would fit inside Crazy Horse's face.

We found these in Mark's old bedroom before we left. We thought they'd make a great addition to our trip. He looks good, eh?

Our little camp site...we walked from 8pm-midnight before we gave up making it to Mistymoon Lake. There was just too much snow to go as fast as we wanted! If you can't tell, we dug out about 6-8 inches of snow in order to camp here.

Lots of snow!

Here we are...still on our way to Mistymoon!

We had to bundle up at our breaks so we didn't cool off too much. Luckily this rock gave us some shelter from the wind. PS: check out my gators [the things around my ankles that kept snow out of my boots]. I didn't have them when we climbed Mt. Hood, and my feet were soaked! I LOVED them. My feet stayed dry and warm the whole way!

Hiking back out. Doesn't look like much snow, but it's deceptive. There were many places it was up to our knees!

Beautiful sunset.

Ever seen those bumper stickers that say, "Where the heck is Wall Drug?" There are about 150 or more billboards that mention it on the way toward Wall, SD...so we took a 5 block detour to see what it is...not much. It's a touristy drug store that this little tiny town uses to draw people in. We just drove by, but I did get coffee for 15 cents at a gas station down the road. Bonus!

We took a little detour on this road that parallels the interstate to drive through the Badlands on the way home. It was really cool! They are these really sweet rock formations that sometimes have reds and yellows in them too.

More of the Badlands. The little museum says that there used to be an ocean through here millions of years ago and that's how these were all formed.