Thursday morning and we were packing up to head East to Custer, South Dakota. The sky was overcast and as we were getting the car hooked up to the RV, the turkeys came out to say goodbye!! At one point there were 16 of them in the area.As we pulled out onto I-90 East, we were barely out of the Campground in Buffalo and there along the road was a sign for "Wall Drug" in South Dakota.
Wall Drug Store, often simply called "Wall Drug", is a tourist attraction in the town of Wall, South Dakota. It is a shopping mall consisting of a drug store, gift shop, restaurants and various other stores.
The small town drugstore make its first steps towards
fame when it was purchased by Ted Hustead in 1931. Hustead was a Nebraska native who was looking for a small town with a Catholic church in which to establish his business. He bought Wall Drug, located in a 231-person town in what he referred to as "the middle of nowhere", and strove to make a living. Business was very slow until his wife, Dorothy, got the idea to advertise free ice water to parched travelers heading to the newly-opened Mount Rushmore monument 60 miles to the west. From that time on, business was brisk.
Wall Drug earns much of its fame from its self
promotion. Wall Drugs has over 500 miles of billboards on Interstate 90, stretching from Minnesota to Billings, Montana. Wall Drug spends an estimated of $400,000 on billboards every year. Signs have been seen as far away as the metro in Paris, by rail commuters in Kenya and bus passengers in London.
Over a million people stop at Wall Drug every year - 20,000 on a good summer day.
As we continued over to Custer, I was amazed with the number of sheep along the roadside!!
As we were closer to South Dakota and the Black
Hills, the Black Hills looked more like the "Brown" Hills, the number of trees that were dead on the hill side was amazing. It seems that the mountain pine beetle has once again invaded the Black Hills. The mountain pine beetle is a small insect that lives most of its life in the inner bark of pine trees. They fly from infested tree to new host trees in late June or July. Once they have located a favorable living host pine, the adults tunnel beneath the bark to lay eggs. After the eggs hatch the young, known as larvae, feed within the tree until the following spring when they pupate, a resting stage, for several weeks before becoming adults. The adults emerge from the dead, yet often still green, host and seek a new tree to begin the cycle again.Mountain pine beetles are native to the Black Hills and have probably inhabited the Hills as long as there has been a pine forest. This insect goes through cycles where they become very abundant and then relatively rare. When the beetle population is very low, only stressed or weakened trees, such as those struck by lightning are colonized. However, about every ten years or so the beetle population increases and the beetles begin colonizing healthy as well as stressed trees. These outbreaks last for about five to 13 years after which the beetle population once again declines.
The first outbreak in the Black Hills occurred in the late 1890's. About five outbreaks have occurred since that time. The outbreak in the early 1970s resulted in the loss of more than 440,000 trees. The last outbreak occurred from 1988 to 1992 and resulted in the death of approximately 50,000 trees. The present infestation is expected to increase during the next five years.
We plan on staying here for about a week to see some of the sights that we have missed in the past. The weather is supposed to be good.
That is all for now.
Love,
Candy and Johnny
