Flying into, staying in, and exploring Rapid City South Dakota on a “national park vacation” wasn’t only out of convenience to Mount Rushmore, Badlands, Wind Cave, Theodore Roosevelt, Devils Tower or Little Bighorn… (I think that’s most of them; we didn’t see them all.)

Neither was it the affordability of a rental car to take to Yellowstone.

My connection to Rapid City is more personal: my mother was born there.

I asked her if she remembered anything I could look up while passing through, and her only memory is of “a picnic by a lake.”

Instead of visiting random parks near lakes, I discovered a local feature that she certainly would have been to as a child, which gave me a thin link to my South Dakota heritage.

Can you spot the attraction in this partial view of the city?

Does this help?

OK, here it is in full: