Dinosaur Park
Here is an easy spot to visit. Right plunk in the middle of town. For groups that include small children it is a great choice. No entrance fees. Plenty to see and experience, but you are never too far from the car or lunch if the someone gets fussy. It combines kitschy americana with layers of history, science, and culture so it is worth going again and again. Easy to find, too 'cause it is marked by an 80 foot dinosaur visible from all over town.
This is a place we visited when we were kids, and now we take the youngest cousins- and the occasional kitten on a leash. We have three generations worth of photographs of kids sitting on the same life size concrete dinosaurs. This is a park for families and tourists, but it also has the marks and memories of generations of teens and the eerie history of a frontier town overlaid with modern struggles to define a community.
Today Ash, Shadow, and I climbed the hill to take our own pictures.
It has been sunny and warm so the lack of "winter maintenance" doesn't bother us too much- though my shoes were ill chosen. Definitely time to get running shoes with a little more tread on them!
We got all the traditional pictures- sitting at the base of the bronto-oops, apatosaurus, climbing on the triceratops, and the handsome duckbill.
Then we spent some time exploring the trees and rocks and just looking at the view.
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| Ash looking east over the parking lot and gift shop |
The rocks here tell their own kind of story. How long have teenagers come here to carve their names in the sandstone? I have memories of this. So do my parents. Were there kids coming up here for gently illicit adventures during the depression?
So many contrasts are visible here. Shadow is standing a masonry wall that I walked on as a child. Beyond the railing is a faded much patched asphalt surface that follows the natural contours of the hill. The red tinted decorative concrete surface of the walkway has been added in the last decade and shows little wear.
There is older, more violent history here as well.
This plaque in the parking area tells how justice was served when Rapid City was a frontier town. The artist's depiction on the plaque shows the tree and rocks that used to be a part of the our dinosaur hill visits.
Sometime in the last few decades this historic landmark- complete with hanging tree- mysteriously became private property. Even though it is only a few hundred yards from the rest of the park the rocks were fenced off and a private home built. Now instead of climbing the rocks and telling chilling tales of frontier justice we are greeted by hostile signs and iron fencing. The familiar hanging tree and rock lookout are still there, but we no longer have the right to touch this piece of history.
It looks like I am not the only person who was upset by this.
I like to end my visit to Dinosaur Park by driving along Skyline Drive. This crumbly narrow road is an adventure to drive- or to jog. You wind along the tip top of the ridge looking far down to the city on either side of you. It is a lovely drive that appeals to something deep inside. The last few years I notice signs all along the drive indicating a wilderness area. This seems odd given that you are in the center of the second largest city in the state of South Dakota. I did a bit of research and sure enough there is a good story behind these signs. The fencing off and privatizing of city landmarks appears to have offended quite a few of us. A group known as the Skyline Drive Preservation Group purchased 160 acres at the top of this hill to keep it from being developed the way Hangman's Rock was. They donated it to the city in 2006. While there are quite a few houses up here, there is enough empty land to keep the eerie feel that makes this such a favorite area to explore. I don't know who the members of this preservation group are, but I can't help feeling I have found kindred spirits here!
One other favorite spot is a stone that marks a death of another kindred spirit. A small turnout along Skyline drive beckons me to stop and look out to the west. Standing here you can see the west side of town laid out like a map and the Black Hills stretched out behind.
The story on this stone is of a man who came here to get a view of a fire that was threatening hundreds of homes. It was known as the Westberry trails fire. This was the worst of a series of fires started by an arsonist in 1988 and this high vantage point must have been a spectacular place to watch the fire. The problem with high vantage points is that they attract lightning, something which we are all aware of yet often choose to ignore...Mark Mcgough lost his life in a lightning strike that day. The fire was put out with only 15 homes destroyed, and the arsonist was never found.
Today was sunny and warm with just enough wind to bring scents to the dogs. Our visit to Dinosaur Hill and Skyline Drive was satisfying, especially as the ever changing South Dakota weather brought grey clouds and sprinkles soon after we returned home.
From inexpensive souvenirs to truly accomplished works of art, the Mercantile has a bit of everything. It is mostly the work of individual artisans or small collectives. This is exactly the kind of shop I am looking for when shopping locally!
