south dakota

This is some of my most favorite landscape: grasses on rolling hills. The Badlands are to the south of this picture (we are looking north). The Buffalo Gap National Grasslands here are part of the Nebraska National Forest, because grasslands are administered by the United States Forest Service. 

Yes, that is a telephone or electric wire pole in the middle of the picture.

minnesota

Southwestern Minnesota is Tallgrass Prairie, without much tallgrass left, but with lots of agriculture and sky and wind. Windmills are going up everywhere, the same kind as we see in the Southern Tier and the Tug Hill of New York State. These things are huge. Here are the rotors, waiting to be trucked to wherever they will be assembled into working windmills. This site is in Pipestone, home to one of the few places in the country where a very soft red metamorphic clay is found layered beneath 20 feet of really hard quartzite. This red rock, called Catlinite in honor of George Catlin, the painter, who first brought examples of the rock to Boston where no one knew what it was, was carved by the local Indians into pipes for specific occasions. Pipestone National Monument is the location of the original quarries.