badlands

While visiting the badlands we stayed in Wall, South Dakota.

This is Dakota Mill & Grain, Inc. in Wall, South Dakota. My KAP objective was the infamous Wall Drug store on the main street (in the upper left corner of the first photo). Numerous power lines made launching a kite in the downtown area iffy, at least for the direction the wind was blowing this day. The people at Dakota Mill & Grain kindly let me launch on their property and I intended to walk the kite and camera into town. After about 15 minutes of KAPing their facility I started to make my way to town but the wind picked up intensely and I had to back up to my “big space”, anchor the kite and walk it down with a pulley. It was quite a struggle and although disappointed with not reaching my objective, I was glad to finally have camera and kite back to the ground.

These photographs were taken using kite aerial photography (KAP).

Dakota Mill & Grain, Wall, South Dakota.

Overhead view of part of the facility.

Another overhead view from a different angle.

A closer view.

The open area where I launched and took down the kite. Thank goodness for those heavy pipes on the ground. In the end I had to anchor the kite line to a pipe and use a pulley to bring the gear down. The wind was too fierce to pull it in by hand.