About 30 minutes outside of Sioux Falls, we saw a sculpture garden a few miles up the road. You see, out here there are very few trees, just rolling hills to provide vantage points of prairie grass. On the spur of the moment, we pulled off the highway and turned onto a dirt road to the Porter Sculpture Park.
I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, but if you happen to be out this way, this is a great place to stop. The artist and his father have set up camp there, although they claimed to live 200 miles away.
“This is the populated area,” the artist and pointed to the prairie that stretched as far as the eye could see with only a highway interrupting. He chuckled a bit as he stood there with sunblock stubbornly peeking through his facial hair.
He told us about the piece he has only to build in model form. The horse should stand sixty feet tall. And since a billboard in these parts cost $30,000 IF you own the land, he thought that in the future he would be able to forgo an advertising budget. The horse will be made from the same material the forty foot bull’s head is made out of – railroad tie planks.
The sculpture park consisted of a huge pieces, too numerous to guess how many. 50? 75? 100? Could be.
TIP: if you do come here, spray bug repellant on before you take a gander through the park. As we were talking with the artist, Marc scratched an itch on his shoulder only to see a tick. Then another. Then another. We both stripped near the car and got rid of about six ticks between us. From then on, any itch we felt (even one up a nostril) we thought was a tick.
“Oh yea,” the artist said after we noticed the first one. “Check yourself for ticks. I usually tell people that AFTER they take a tour. It would be bad for business otherwise.”
Thanks.
