Northern Return - Day 4 (Rapid City, SD to Minneapolis, MN)

This morning, I got up early and headed into the Black Hills National Forest to visit Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which Paul Lichstein had told me was a 'must-see'. It was cool to be up close to a monument that I've seen so much over the years and the museum and exhibitions that they have about the process of designing and building Mount Rushmore and all of the people involved are really interesting. The Black Hills Institute focuses on paleontological findings and they have the one of the best collections of T-Rex fossils out there. It's amazing to see where all of these guys came from and imagine them roaming the open plains of what's now Montana and the Dakotas and Canada. Leaving the Black Hills National Forest, I made my way through the Badlands National Park which borders two of the Lakota reservations - Pine Ridge Reservation and Rosebud Indian Reservation. The Badlands are incredibly cool, again I'm really interested in the geology and dynamic landscape. After I made my way through the prairie lands of the Rosebud Reservation, it was back onto I-90 and over to Sioux Falls where I stopped for lunch/dinner before making my way into Minnesota, onto Route 60 and up to Minneapolis for the night. Coming across South Dakota and Minnesota, it was really neat to see the landscapes where the Little House on the Prairie books were set since I loved those so much as a kid. They have a couple of historic markers about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family along the way.