Tag: sioux falls

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Snow Birds

The first major snowstorm of the season hit the midwest on Friday. Only a few inches were initially expected in Sioux Falls, but the city saw record snowfall by the end of the day. The previous record for November 20 was 3.8 inches in 1975. A whopping 14 inches were reported on the south side of town while northern Sioux Falls received about half as much. Christian Begeman spent a few hours at the Outdoor Campus that afternoon, observing birds stocking up at the feeders. See more of his work at cbegeman.blogspot.com.

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South Dakota Road Adventures

By Katie Hunhoff

We have a feature in our current South Dakota Magazine (July/August) on traveling Old Highway 16. At first I wanted to title it “Highway 16: The Perfect S.D. Road Trip” but my fellow editors talked me out of that. It sounds like the perfect road trip to me, but probably isn’t for those who don’t want to go off-roading for a few miles here or there. Our photographer nearly collided with a longhorn cow in Haakon County.

Luckily, we have several other summer travel recommendations for those who like their roads more civilized. Here are some basic recommendations for road-tripping 16, and a few other highlights from our summer travel issue.

Highway 16 covers a 400-mile stretch between our east and west borders, connecting Sioux Falls with Rapid City and several smaller communities along the way. It was part of a 1,600-mile passage between Detroit and Yellowstone National Park that was linked nearly a century ago. A group formed in 1919 to promote the journey in South Dakota, which intersected at times with Highways 14 and 20.

Take time to travel the back roads that are now Highway 16 and you’ll find many remnants of its heyday, including places that made the transition to Interstate 90 such as Wall Drug, the Pioneer Auto Show in Murdo and Reptile Gardens. There are also some great restaurants, like Al’s Oasis, Hutch’s in Presho and the Back 40 near Kimball, a renovated Highway 16 gas station.

For a complete guide to 16, see our July/August issue. Or, like the article’s author, you can play it by ear and see if you can piece together the old roadway on your own. Old 16 enters South Dakota from Minnesota as 262nd Street at Valley Springs, just east of Sioux Falls. The highway is easier to find on the other side of the state because it is still known as U.S. Highway 16.

Our current issue also highlights our state’s 13 National Natural Landmarks, any of which would make a great summer road trip. The U.S. Interior Department began the program in 1962 to highlight our country’s biological and geological diversity. “The sites help tell the story of our nation’s natural heritage through representations of different features,” says Heather Eggleston, a regional National Natural Landmark coordinator. “Those included in the program are the best examples of those features still in existence.”

South Dakotas 13 designations include glacial lakes and sloughs, timeworn buttes and prehistoric rock. Some of the 13 landmarks are well known, such as Bear Butte, and others were a surprise even to our staff, such as Red Lake (Brule County), Buffalo Slough (Lake County) and Snake Butte (Jackson County).

Snake Butte is 23 miles south of Interior on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It features one of the world’s best collections of sand calcite crystals. In fact, South Dakota is one of only a few places on the globe where the crystals are found. They form when water containing dissolved calcite seeps through sand beds. Over time, the calcite forms crystals that surround the sand, between 15 to 20 inches in length. The butte is located in a beautiful sloping and wide-open area of the Pine Ridge, which is worth the drive itself.

South Dakota sweeping landscapes, amazing geological diversity and friendly communities make it an ideal place to get on the road and see what adventures you’ll find. We hope our summer road recommendations inspire you to hit the road — but if it’s Highway 16, be sure to yield to the longhorn cattle.

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“Look At Me”

Ms. Wheelchair South Dakota will have a simple message when she represents our state at the national event in Des Moines, Iowa at the end of July.
Look at the person, she says, not the disability.
Dixie Lemme, 65, of Sioux Falls was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2002, and has been using a wheelchair for the last nine years.”Lots of times people see the chair, they don’t see you,” Lemme told Jill Callison of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Lemme is a comedian who knows how to communicate a message. So she entered the pageant to tell the story of people who happen to have disabilities.
“I just want to open up some eyes to hopefully make people see things,” she says.”People that are disabled have jobs, they have their family, but people have prejudices about them.”
Congratulations to a real champ for people with disabilities. She’ll make us proud in Iowa.

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Flag Day at Veterans’ Memorial Park

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II and the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end. Sioux Falls residents and area veterans commemorated the occasions with a special Flag Day ceremony at Veterans’ Memorial Park on June 14. Photos by Scott and Marilyn Korsten. See more of Scott’s work at InspiredByNatureImages.com.

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Dakota Awakening

By Christian Begeman

Another spring is settling in. I like to muse that the season is much more than simply another tilt of the planet back towards the sun. It’s the annual promise of new life. It’s another chance to smell rain on the wind. It’s another year to chase the light and see what is beyond the next bend. Springtime provides a lot to be thankful for, but also is a time of nostalgia for me. I remember life awakening on the farm, the smell of the first cut grass, the song of the meadowlark from a distant fencepost and the smell of plowed earth at planting time. This year, the season’s signature flourish of raindrops and rainbows have been few and far between, but thankfully that has not stopped the return of waterfowl on the wind, the greening of the grass and the budding of leaves. The songbirds and wildflowers are back, there’s new warmth in the breeze and the sky seems a bit more blue. Happy Spring everyone!

March 11

While checking the status of ice on area lakes, I startled a large group of migrating waterfowl hanging out in a pond of snowmelt near Silver Lake in northeast Hutchinson County.

March 20

On the official first day of spring I took a sunset hike around the edge of Buffalo Slough south of Chester. All ice is completely gone.

March 31

I found a rather large, wild pasqueflower patch a few miles south of Lake Vermillion including a lovely little natural bouquet of five.

April 4

Just like last spring, a lunar eclipse took place, but dawn approached too quickly to see the full”blood moon.” This photo was taken roughly 20 minutes before totality above Skresfrud Lutheran of rural Lincoln County. Since I was already up, I checked the bird feeders at Good Earth State Park and watched the early bird (robin) get its worm.

April 5

Temperatures reached the low 70s on this Easter Day. In the afternoon, I went looking for snow trillium at Newton Hills State Park and found many blossoms as well as a half dozen Question Mark butterflies soaking up the day’s warmth amongst the last year’s leaves.

April 12

A spring day for the books! First I explored Union Grove State Park to find an early flowering bush along the trail. Later, after a brief thunderstorm passed, an afternoon rainbow graced the sky over the fields of Union County. In the evening another rainbow appeared on the northwest edge of Vermillion and the magic was far from over. As I drove back to Sioux Falls, the setting sun painted the retreating rain clouds pink and blue north of Chancellor.

April 18

A steady, light rain fell for most of the afternoon in Sioux Falls. It was much needed moisture. I spent some time in the Japanese Garden area of Terrace Park to see if I could capture the mood of the day. I was accompanied by a variety of geese, ducks and songbirds, including a male northern cardinal with raindrops glistening on its vibrant feathers.


Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midcontinent Communications he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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March Madness is Here

By John Andrews

Today the women’s basketball teams from the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University and the SDSU men will play for the Summit League conference title and an automatic bid into their respective NCAA national tournaments. The championship games will cap a festive extended weekend at the new Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls, where city leaders hope the revenue and excitement generated over the four days of the conference tournament will elevate South Dakota into consideration for future, larger college basketball events.

Crowds hovering around 10,000 have proven that South Dakotans love their basketball. That’s always been true. A story on the Gann Valley Buffaloes and the 1955 State B Tournament that appears in our current issue says that as many as 4,000 people showed up to watch the consolation round. Crowd numbers for those high school tournaments may not be what they once were, but all the games are now broadcast on public television and streamed over the Internet. You could find all of the Summit League conference games on the Midcontinent Sports Network and online through ESPN, but the tournament remained a hot ticket. Many believed the crowd at Monday’s State-U semifinal men’s game would be the largest to ever watch a basketball game in South Dakota history. It came close — the 10,153 fans that attended fell just short of the estimated 11,500 people who saw Armour beat Beresford in the 1979 State B championship game at the Rapid City Civic Arena, according to Stu Whitney of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

NCAA executives who visited Sioux Falls for the tournament gushed about the Premier Center, the 12,000-seat facility that opened last fall. They were similarly impressed with the nearby Sanford Pentagon, a 3,200-seat arena that recently hosted the Northern Sun conference tournament and is”perfectly built for Division II basketball,” NCAA rep Mark Davis told the Argus. Augustana College, which just finished an all-time best 30-2 season, won that tournament and the right to host a regional there this weekend. Aberdeen’s Northern State University (23-8) will be that tournament’s sixth seed.

I attended Saturday night’s session at the Premier Center, and the possibilities are exciting for college basketball fans. Sioux Falls has already placed a bid to host an opening round of the NCAA tournament but it was denied. Those sites are set through 2018. The Premier Center will host a women’s regional in 2016, so perhaps a men’s regional won’t be far behind. The sticking point seems to be available hotel space, something the city will surely look to remedy before sites are selected for 2019 and beyond.

Basketball on this stage was hard for a lot of South Dakotans to imagine when South Dakota State announced its intent to move from Division II to Division I in 2003. Petitions circulated around Brookings lobbying the school to stay in the relative safety of Division II. State lawmakers introduced resolutions against the move. As a writer for the Brookings Register, I recall sitting through hours of testimony before the Board of Regents in Sioux Falls.

SDSU had a plan, but executing it was not easy. Men’s basketball coach Scott Nagy has always been honest about the struggles of the transition (hear him talk about them in this interview with SDSU athletic director Justin Sell, recorded before this year’s Summit League conference tournament).

But success has once again come to SDSU, and it’s clear the University of South Dakota — which reclassified several years after SDSU — is on the upswing as well. And so are other schools, like Augie, Northern, the University of Sioux Falls and Dakota Wesleyan University, whose boisterous students rock the”Corn Crib” at each home game in the Corn Palace.

It’s a good time to be a basketball fan in South Dakota.

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Metropolis and Me

By Roger Holtzmann

Most of the people who know me are aware of my fondness for Star Trek in all its many guises. What they don’t know is that part of me — a microscopic, infinitesimally small part — is actually ashamed of how much I know about the series. I can curse in both Klingon and Romulan. Seriously.

If you don’t understand those references count yourself lucky. On the nerd scale, from 1 to 100, knowing the name of an extraterrestrial species rates a 75. Knowing their language adds 20 points to that woeful total. I am on razor thin ice, dignity-wise: the only way for me to fall further, to actually peg the nerdometer, would be to don a costume and attend a sci-fi convention.

Which I … well, never mind.

Time travel is a recurring theme in Star Trek, and no matter how ridiculous or illogical the plots, I find those episodes endlessly fascinating because they spur my imagination. I would love to journey backwards in time and discover how they transported those great stones to Stonehenge, or forward a century to see what kinds of junk food they eat in the future.

I ask you, dear readers, even if you find such speculation ludicrous, to fire up your imaginations and visit me in early November of last year. I’m sitting in front of my computer. I’ve just written,”I’m sitting in front of my computer …” and wondering what will come next. Now I’m scratching my ear. Now I’m staring at a dark spot on the ceiling and wondering if it’s a bug, which I have done at least a hundred times. Now I’m wondering what we’re having for supper. Now I’m remembering it’s probably going to be leftover chili. Now I’m happy because I think chili always tastes better the second day. Now I’m wondering why.

Time travel, as you can see, isn’t all about witnessing noteworthy historical events. It’s often boring and always confusing. To wit: at this moment in your temporal journey — which is back then for you now when you’re reading this but now for me back then — you know things I will know when it is now for me. For both of us, I mean. Are you following this?

Among the many things I don’t know in back then now is how the 2010 high school football playoffs will end. All I do know is that the big schools’ champion will be from Sioux Falls, because the four semi-finalists are all from that city.

“Is this a joke?” you snort.”You pretend violated the laws of physics and got my thens and nows mixed up just to talk about some stupid football games? I don’t believe you! I’m going back to January! In my head, I mean, because I always was in … AARRRGGGHHHH!”

Wait! Don’t turn the page! No more fake time travel, I promise. Give me a minute to explain why those games were a big stinking deal and what that portends for the future of Sioux Falls and South Dakota.

Here’s the deal. I am an admitted football fanatic, yet my attitude was,”Who cares? Not me, that’s for sure!” Why such petulance, you ask? It was a simple case of sour grapes. It’s petty and it’s poor sportsmanship and I hate to admit it, but gee whiz! Sioux Falls seems to be winning everything these days!

Before I go on, let me emphasize that I harbor no ill will for the good people of Sioux Falls. I love you guys like Moe loves Curly! Think of my pique as an inevitable consequence of the growth of your city. Technically speaking, you are still within the four square boundaries of South Dakota, but your relationship with the rest of us is changing.

Let me illustrate my theory by using the example of our sister state to the south. Nebraska has lots of farms and small towns, and many of the people who live in them think of such places as the”real” Nebraska. Their relationship with the”other” Nebraska, Omaha, is complicated. When their children grow up and want to wear suits to work instead of seed caps they are glad so many kinds of Big City careers are available in the O, yet the grandkids are only a day trip away. They are also, in a very real sense, as proud as the city’s residents that so many possibilities and amenities can be found so close to home.

At the same time, there is an uneasy”nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” attitude in the wide open spaces beyond Dodge Street. Every step removed from the way things are done in a small town is seized upon and exaggerated; parallels are drawn to Sodom and Gomorrah. When a son decides to move there, mothers sigh and light a candle. If a daughter gets a job in the city fathers start forwarding them e-mails with subject lines of”Top Ten Tips for Surviving in a Godless Metropolis,” like always look through the peephole before you open your apartment door and never leave home without mace in your purse. They envy the city for its advantages and resent its successes. What galls most of all is that so many young people would rather visit and shop and live there than in the”real” Nebraska.

Okay, perhaps I’m exaggerating. A little. Besides, Sioux Falls and the rest of South Dakota aren’t quite to that stage in their relationship yet.

But if you step into my time machine …

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the January/February 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Rethinking South Dakota

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Some BBC filmmakers spent December in South Dakota. No, they weren’t being punished with exile. These BBC film-journalists are on the inaugural tour of BBC Pop UP, the new mobile bureau the BBC has commissioned to create snapshots of local life that wouldn’t bubble up from their usual big-city bureau coverage.

BBC Pop Up is doing snapshots, not comprehensive sociology. But the three videos they’ve posted so far paint an interesting outsider’s perspective of our fair state.

First, the filmmakers remind us that, whatever our aspirations to urbanness and urbaneness, we don’t cut much of a profile with folks from elsewhere. On their way here, the BBC boys stop in Chicago, where our Governor has been advertising our greatness, and finds folks in the Windy City don’t know much about where that wind comes from.

The reporters get to Sioux Falls, look out at the open prairie beyond their back-porch door, and declare themselves (and us) to be in”the middle of nowhere.” It’s inconceivable for me to think of anywhere on the edge of Sioux Falls as”the middle of nowhere.” I look out past the Ellis Road and think,”Everything is out there! Hartford, Humboldt, Montrose, and Mitchell! I could turn right and go to Brookings, left and go to Vermillion!” To these guys who’ve just gotten here for the first time, who don’t know the steakhouses and sloughs and happy hunting grounds over the horizon, our prairie paradise is a blank, a mystery, a fearful expanse of oblivion.

Our guests did get out and discover who fills the prairie. They talked to folks at Hy-Vee and found people talking about fitness, Native issues, concerns about Indian children in foster care, teacher pay, opposition to Keystone XL … not exactly the assortment of issues I’d expect from a random sampling of a supposedly red state.

Beyond Sioux Falls, the roving reporters didn’t paint the lefse and lutefisk threshing jamboree state that might first leap to our Scandinavian minds. The BBC team focused on some of the oldest and newest South Dakotans, neither of whom look like the majority.

BBC Pop Up went to Rosebud and Pine Ridge to talk to our Lakota neighbors. Sure, there were photos of Indians on horseback and impoverished houses. But the reporters found a Lakota political activist, a filmmaker, an”alter-Native” rock band (alter-Native… as in alter your perception of Natives?), and other young people sometimes fighting through tears to show their spirit and optimism.

BBC Pop Up then featured the Karen refugees from Burma who have made Huron their home. Perhaps 1,800 of these folks have come to Huron in the last decade, largely to work at the Dakota Provisions turkey plant. The BBC filmmakers captured their hard work, their adjustment to American ways of life and South Dakota weather (one man still forgoes boots as”too heavy” and wears sandals in winter), and their still uncomfortable fit in the community. A white neighbor grouses that over 20 Karen immigrants live in the house next door and — horrors upon horrors! — they killed a hog in their backyard and ate it. (Hey, what you call gross, I call barbecue.)

One month in South Dakota and three short documentary clips can’t capture an entire state. But BBC Pop Up’s editorial choices for their first coverage here shows an instructive perspective on the South Dakota that most of us living in the prairie soup may not see as clearly as newcomers.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a conservative perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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“This Exit” Opens in Sioux Falls

Anyone who enjoys traveling South Dakota will enjoy a new exhibit at the Ipso Gallery in downtown Sioux Falls (400 N. Main to be exact, just east of the Old Courthouse Museum and its clock steeple). The exhibit is a celebration of the state’s road culture, assembled to coincide with South Dakota’s 125th birthday year. The show is called”This Exit: Last Chance.”

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How Have You Said”Happy Birthday?”

By John Andrews

I was 10 years old when South Dakota celebrated its centennial. I remember the wagon train rolling through Main Street of Lake Norden, and Marian Henjum’s homage to homesteaders on the centennial postage stamp that she designed.

As the state turns 125, there have been several similar traditional celebrations. A wagon train rolled out of Yankton in September, making a 17-day journey to Pierre. Last weekend the South Dakota Symphony performed in the halls of the state capitol, as the dome’s restored stained glass was officially unveiled. And there’s cake today (Tuesday) at the University of South Dakota’s Muenster Center.

In Sioux Falls, you’ll find a quirkier celebration of South Dakota. You’ve seen the kitschy tourist ads that line Interstate 90 a thousand times, but you probably never thought of them as art. Neither did Altman Studeny until he was living in Maine, going to graduate school and missing the art and culture of the Great Plains.”My mind was filled with thoughts of the time I spent on the road, seeing examples of the unique visual culture that grows from the land and the history of South Dakota: jackalopes, grain palaces, cowboy orchestras, dinosaurs silhouetted in the evening sun,” Studeny says.

Studeny is curator of a new exhibit featuring such items at the IPSO Gallery in Sioux Falls called”This Exit, Last Chance,” running Nov. 7 through Jan. 30. It commemorates the 125th anniversary of South Dakota and the 10th anniversary of Fresh Produce, the Sioux Falls advertising agency that houses the IPSO Gallery on Main Avenue. Gallery director Liz Heeren knows it’s an ambitious idea. “We can analyze them differently and celebrate them as the art pieces that they are,” she says. “I think we’ll see common threads. We’ll see a do-it-yourself attitude that seems to come from South Dakota tourism. I love that about the pieces that we’re collecting.”

Participating partners include Wall Drug, the Corn Palace and Reptile Gardens, just to name a few. An opening reception is scheduled at the IPSO Gallery Friday, Nov. 7 at 6 p.m. Plan to attend, and wish South Dakota your best on its next 125 years.