Dinosaur Park

If you’ve followed us for a while, you probably know Peyton is obsessed with The Land Before Time. She owns every single movie and episode ever made. Even the one that came out earlier this year! When I found out there was a dinosaur park in Rapid City I knew it was going to be on our list of places to stop by. Unfortunately, majority of attractions close the first part of October in Rapid City, South Dakota. So, we didn’t get to see what was inside the building at Dinosaur Park but we were still able to walk around and see the statues throughout the park.

When we first pulled up at Dinosaur Park I immediately noticed the amount of stairs. There’s a ton of them! The only way you are going to see all the statues is to walk those steps. And so that is exactly what we did. We went up the hill, walked a bazillion steps and took pictures on every single dinosaur we saw along the way.

There are a few dinosaurs you can see at the bottom of the steps. So that was what we did first. The kids walked around and took in the view of Rapid City from the hill before we started climbing the even bigger hill.

The climb was not as bad as I thought it would be. Along the way, you can stop and look at dinosaur statues. So, you would climb a few stairs, play on a dinosaur and then keep ascending up the stairs to the next dinosaur until you reached the top. At the top was a humungous Brontosaurus, he overlooks the whole park as well as the valley. When we finally arrived at the top, Peyton looked around and proclaimed this must be The Great Valley! You know, from The Land Before Time movies. Peyton was convinced that Little Foot and his friends used to live here.

After we took some pictures and the kids played around we started our journey back down the hill to our car. And on our way down we stopped at each dinosaur for one more climb and one more picture.

The kids really enjoyed Dinosaur Park. It was a good way for them to burn off some energy before we started our drive to our next adventure. The steps were a little intense and I could see how if you have knee problems this would not be a stop for you. If you do decide to make this a stop on your next visit to South Dakota I would allow about 45 minutes to do the steps, take pictures and play on the dinosaurs. I think we were there about 30 minutes.