Sioux Falls, South Dakota

June 9, 2025

We spent most of our travel day paralleling pretty much the entire southern border of Minnesota, ending the trip just over the western border in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Northeastern Iowa

It's a nice Minnesota welcome sign, but a bit hard to read

Our first Wall Drug sign!

Not our first wind turbine sighting

Our campground for the next five nights was in Big Sioux Recreation Area, less than 20 minutes to the city center of Sioux Falls. Our campsite was on the nicer side of average.

The recreation area offered a beautiful disc golf course, just steps away from our campsite, which we took advantage of on Friday.

The Big Sioux River

This was quite a lush course--wasn't expecting this in South Dakota

Strategic plots of stinging nettle provided extra incentive to stay on the fairway!

Rick ended up slamming one too many trees and cracked his disc, so we later had to make a trip to Walmart to buy a new one.

Saturday was a gorgeous sunny day, so we headed to Sioux Falls to check out the Falls and ride the very nice Sioux Falls Recreation Trail that circumscribed the city.

The ruins of the Queen Bee Mill folly

We discovered this fun Mario Wall in a random parking lot near the trail

This shot only took about 5 takes!

Afterwards, we made a short trip to the nearby Amazon box to pick up our new faucet...

As much as we love to hate Amazon the company, there's no denying the convenience for our lifestyle.

We had a little time to kill before mass at the cathedral, so we Julie walked around the historic cathedral district to check out the old houses (Rick followed in the truck). Julie really likes old houses, but Rick can't get beyond thinking what a maintenance nightmare they must be 😉.

The Pettigrew historical museum

Definitely not a stalker 😉

St. Joseph Cathedral It's never easy to get a good picture of a really tall building from up close

The next day's activity was Pipestone National Monument in southwestern Minnesota, about a 45 minute drive from Sioux Falls. The monument preserves an interesting geological area containing a historic catlinite (aka pipestone) quarry that Native Americans used for raw material for their ceremonial pipes. As national monuments go, it is pretty small--a visitor center and a 3/4 mile trail rounds out the public access portion of the park. Additional acreage is set aside for registered present-day tribe members to mine pipestone via permit. Only hand tools are permitted, and it is difficult and tedious work to dig through the deep layer of hard quartzite before reaching the relatively thin layer of pipestone.

Interesting stone building in the town of Pipestone

The 3/4 mile trail through prairie and rock formations

An active private quarry

Our first glimpse of interesting geology

Pretty easy to spot the Oracle

Rick wisely opted against trying out Leaping Rock

The last day was spent doing boring things--laundry, fixing the faucet, and such. The weather was pretty cool (high of maybe 65, but the forecast for our travel day was expected to be in the mid 90s. It seems that many places we have been to have the adage, "If you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes."

All in all, we really enjoyed are stay in Sioux Falls. It had a lot more interest than we were expecting, and it seemed like a nice place to live (if we ever wanted to live in South Dakota, which is probably not super likely).

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