We didn’t
get to the license branch until after noon, had to watch a Charlton Heston
movie first. At the license branch we
got in at a slow time and managed to have all of the documents we needed so the
process went rather quickly. Our
pictures even turned out pretty good.
We came back
home for lunch and then headed back into town to Falls Parks – what a beautiful
place. The Big Sioux River flows through
the park, so the falls here are quite a bit bigger than the falls we are used
to in Falls Park at Pendleton, IN. I
read somewhere that it was called the place of a “thousand falls”. I can understand that description, it’s hard
to get all of the falls in one picture.
I found out
that the pink rock around here are pink quartzite and there are huge boulders
of it all over the park. A sign in the
park said that the quartzite is relatively erosion resistant, the Big Sioux
River has flowed through the same place for over 10,000 years.
The Falls
Overlook Café is located in the old Sioux Falls Light and Power Company
hydroelectric plant which was completed in 1908. In its time it housed three 500-kilowatt
generators.
The triple
berry pie and vanilla ice cream come highly recommended by us.
The Queen
Bee Mill ground its first flour back in 1881.
At the time of its construction, the seven-story mill was one of the
most advanced in America. The mill
burned in 1956, destroying the wooden roof and interior walls. It is now the site of concerts at the park.
The visitors
center and observation tower provide a breathtaking view of the whole falls
area.
This shot is
the best one I have that shows the difference between the pink surfaces and the
normal concrete surfaces.
The park is
home to a lot of very large geese. No
one seems to be feeding them so the environment must be very good to them.
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