We woke up this morning in our cabin in the middle of the Badlands. I did a little research on visiting an old ICBM launch facility and found out tickets were first come first serve, so we drove just outside of the park to get our tickets for the afternoon, and then headed back into the park to do some exploring. We drove west a few miles and stopped of at a few viewpoints and did a couple hikes. It was very nice weather. Clear skies, 70 degrees, light breeze. This would all change drastically later in the day.
After feeling we had adequately explored the Badlands, we drove down a dirt road toward Delta-01, the missile launch facility. We weren't entirely sure if we had reached the facility when Google maps said we had arrived at our destination. It was very unassuming from the outside, which I guess is the point. It looked like an average ranch house, other than the chain link fence going around the area. The ranger showed us around the facility, which they tried to showcase as it would have looked when it closed in 1993 -- a People magazine sitting on an old coffee table with Princess Diana on the cover.
Once we passed the crew facilities, we reached an elevator that descended thirty feet underground to a massive concrete and steel door that separated the control room from the outside world. The crew room was actually suspended in a way so that it could move several feet in either direction if it took a hit from a Soviet missile. The two-man crew who would be stationed inside did not have much in the form of entertainment. They would typically be in here for 24 hours straight. After exiting the facility we drove to an old missile silo, which was several miles down the road. We could just look down some plexiglass into the ground to see the missile (now a dud obviously). Despite more than half of America's nuclear missile arsenal being decommissioned, there are still over 450 missile launch sites in existence around the U.S. -- primarily in states with low populations like North Dakota, Wyoming, etc... On our way out of the visitor's center, there was a guestbook where people were supposed to share their thoughts about the prospects of nuclear war and multiple people had trolled the guestbook with things like, "Build a wall!" "Trump!" Disconcerting stuff if you consider that the order to launch comes directly from the President of the United States.
On our way out of South Dakota, we made a stop in Wall for some gas and continued our journey into Wyoming. After checking in to tiny Hulett, Wyoming (pop: 384), we witnessed the temperature plummet about 30 degrees in about an hour. We brought our jackets with us when we drove 20 mins over to Devil's Tower. The wind had really kicked up and the unseasonably warm and pleasant weather we had experienced thusfar abruptly ended once the region realized it was, in fact, October. We did a perimeter walk around the tower that was about a mile and a half.
The weather was beginning to seem actually quite ominous. We drove back into the booming metropolis of Hulett and had dinner at a place called the Ponderosa Cafe. The town is about two blocks long, so we walked there from our hotel. People we had seen at Devil's Tower were also at Ponderosa. We saw them again back at the hotel. It's crazy for me to think that people actually live here -- all 383 of them. Though to be fair, we passed through a town called Aladdin on the way in. There were mile distance signs for a ways, but when we drove through we discovered it had a population of 15 (yes, one five). Welcome to Wyoming.
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