Day 3: Pine Ridge Indian Reservation & Wall Drug, SD

We visited the Lakota Indian Reservation today....good experience for the group.  After breakfast of pancakes and bacon...yum...we stopped at the Oglala Lakota College and learned a little bit about about their history.  From there we headed up to Wall to visit the historic Wall Drug for a good time and some souvenir shopping.   A nice treat for us was to see free range Bison in the Badlands. 

We weathered a pretty intense storm in the evening.  Right as we were getting ready to eat dinner we were hit pretty hard for about an hour.  Most everything stayed dry, a few tent were damp but we have plenty of smiles and laughs to keep things going. ~Mr. Perez
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Today we went to the Oglala Lakota College and also toured the book store. We also went to Indian reservation an visited the visitor center which i must say the video we watched was very depressing. After that we had lunch with the buffalo which was very interesting, after that we visited the Wall Drug stores, it was something new to me since we do not have something like that back in Pittsburg. When we returned back to camp it started to rain an our tent zipper had broke that day so while it is raining we were trying to fix our tent and as we were fixing the door are tent roof caved in because of the rain and we ended up stayin in the vans for the night.
Schoonover

Perez is very cool if i must say. This trip has been a blast, everyone gets along an we all joke around constantly. At the Wall Drug store i bought some blood pills to play a prank on the group but it started raining so that kind of put a damper on the prank. Tomorrow i will play the prank during the camp fire though.
Newport

We went to see the Oglala Indian collage today and learned lots, on a much more depressing note we went to the visitors center and had to watch an extremely long movie about how indians often suffer from alcoholism because of what the government did to them. Then, we went to Wall Drug, which is a bunch of stores all linked together, very cool. Then a little later our tent roof caved in due to heavy rains and me and Will had to fix it.
Carver

I took some pictures of some bison, I feel like I might have come too close to them because every time I looked at them they were staring me down.  The bison seemed peaceful though, they probably wouldn't have charged me, but I still felt their eyes.  Our troop also traveled to Wall Drug which is in Wall, SD.  In the original Wall Drug there are about ten stores and outside of them there are benches with fiber glass people which I just had to take pictures with.  ~Megan

I was appalled and inspired at the Indian Reservation. We went to Oglala College and some of the Indian history of this area was explained. The poverty and hardship that many of the Indians have suffered and are suffering is incredible but through all of this hardship they still have such a rich and beautiful lifestyle, history, and spirituality. We also visited a campsite that was full of bison and prairie dogs. Seeing these animals in their natural habitat so peaceful and undisturbed was amazing!  ~ Sylvia S!

I think it was really interesting at the Oglala Lakota College because we learned about the history of the Lakota tribe. We learned that they were living in such a poor and harsh life and that they try everything just to survive it. We went to a campsite that had a lot of buffalo and prairie dogs and it was really nice and also very interesting. After lunch, we went to the Wall Drug, which was a whole block of stores that were connected to each other and it looked like a western style town, and went shopping. After we got back to camp, it stormed on us while we were about to have dinner.  Fawna

S=singing in the car
O=Oglala Lakota
U=ultimate quiet game
T=tents
H=hiking


D=da best
A=a great experience
K=kosher
O=Ohh my gosh! Is that a snake?
T=tribal museums and colleges
A=angular landscape


Gabrielle Murnan