Badlands & Mount Rushmore

Jeff is taking the whole day off. He wants to tour the Badlands and Black Hills with me. I feel very honoured. After a real American breakfast with about 1.5 tonnes of omelette, we set off towards the Badlands at around eight o’clock. Jeff insists on being my chauffeur. I gratefully accept. The landscape quickly becomes more and more surreal.

After an hour, we arrive in the Badlands and turn off onto a gravel track. Buffalo graze right at the side of the road and make sounds like rutting Harleys. Thousands of small hills are each crowned by a vertical meerkat.
When you honk your horn, you are directing a thousand creatures. Jeff explains to me that many cattle and horses break their legs in their burrows, which is why it is a legitimate national sport to shoot the prarie dogs. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose hair stands on end at the thought.

Jeff talks about ice fishing, hunting trips for giant elk in Custer National Park and gives us the best of twenty years of biker life. The landscape becomes increasingly bizarre. The badlands were formed several million years ago from volcanic ash. The ash turned to soft stone. After the ice age, rivers eroded part of it. The layers of the millennia are clearly distinguishable and shine in shades of white, yellow, red and brown. Each individual rock is like an entire river. The smallest erosions at the top merge into ever larger rivers in the centre, which end in a wide stream at the foot of the rocks.

Did Stanley Kubrick recreate the moon landing here, or was it just Pitch Black, Dune and parts of Star Wars that were filmed in the Badlands? We refuel with ice cream and Coke in a half-abandoned Indian village in the middle of nowhere. We pass grazing goats on the road back to Rapid City.

At lunchtime, I take Jeff out for a pizza. He’s a real bear of a man. Just under two metres tall, certainly 150kg (but not fat) and at least a size 50 shoe, which is exactly how he eats. I’m very happy that he chooses an all-you-can-eat restaurant. Fat pizza in bulk, pasta, potatoes. He stays away from salad and fruit completely. It would be a complete waste of space if you need 2000 calories per meal. In the end, he modestly says that’s nothing at all. His top score was 14 steaks when a new restaurant opened. Incidentally, it went out of business a little later, Jeff reports in the evening.

With a full belly, I let myself be driven to Mount Rushmore. It’s like always with the “big” sights on my journey. Aha. Great. Looks exactly as I imagined it would. Nothing experienced and nothing happened. Ticked off. On a positive note, parking for one day only costs 2 cents. Negative: there are only annual parking cards for 8 dollars.

I offered to cook something, Jeff and his wife Renee were so good to me. But: don’t come through. Fortunately. Renee cooks a home-shot moose in the evening. It’s fantastic, juicy, tender and there’s loads of it. I eat so much that my IQ drops to the level of a rutting moose for a long time. Simply too good. We have a chat with their parents on the terrace in the evening.

Thanks a lot for the magnificent time i had at your place, Renee and Jeff! Hope you’ll get over to Germany next year! Good bye!