| Blue skies, smiling at me. |
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| One reason for staying the night at Wall is because it is close to the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. |
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| There is a film of interviews with people who used to man the Minuteman II sites and a small museum. I liked this sign. It is a recreation of one down in one of the launch control sites. |
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| I didn't note what this was. I think it was a door. |
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| The facility is within the D1 flight. |
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| There is a guided tour of the Delta-01 Launch Facility. I would have liked to have done that, but you need to buy tickets in advance and I didn't know about it until after there were none available. |
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| So instead I went to Delta-09 site. |
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| Apparently it opened fairly recently. There was a park ranger who was there who talked about the site. |
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| As you saw on the map, there were ten missile silos in the Delta flight. This is one of them. The Minuteman II program is inactive now, but someone at the USNPS had the idea to turn one into an exhibit. |
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| There's the personnel access if people needed to get down into to the missile silo. |
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| I know what you are thinking, that this is a giant nipple. It might surprise you to know that it is not. It is a hardened ultra high frequency antenna. |
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| This is the top of the soft support building, a reinforced concrete structure that goes down eleven feet. These held electrical and environmental equipment, including a diesel emergency power generator. |
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| The door over the silo would slide off at a high rate of speed so the missile could soon be on its way to nuke the dirty commie Russian bastards. |
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| A look down into the silo. That's a training missile down in there now. |
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 There were 150 Minuteman II missile silos in South Dakota. The emptiness of the open plains was an ideal location as there was little local population in the area. |
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| So after that little slice of Cold War history, it's back on the road to the nearby Badlands National Park. Again, admission taken care of with my annual pass. |
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 Keep pushing until it's understood and these badlands start treating us good. |
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| There's a little river down there. |
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 There are parts that look like this, all rocky and craggy like. |
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| And then there are other parts that are prairie. |
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| Two bison upright and two bison upside down. Is there such a thing as bison tipping? |
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| Why did the bison cross the road? For any damn reason it wants. |
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| Prairie dogs are much less imposing. |
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| So Saturday was a long drive from southwest South Dakota back up to Billings. Along the route is Sturgis. |
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| In August, this small town is invaded by motorcyclists for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. |
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| Today there were a handful of bikers parked in front of the armory. |
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| It was a bank building. It was built in 1886. That's all I know. |
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| If any bikers are Friends of Bill W, there is a 12-step meeting hall at the Serenity Club. Serenity now. Serenity now! |
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| Don't know what this is either. It has a stage, but it might just be a place where people show off their Harleys. |
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