Rapid City & Pompeii - Same Dif

While I was cleaning up around the house tonight I had the TV on to the History Channel. Between that and the Travel Channel (and maybe a little Sci-Fi tossed in there, too), there’s usually enough nerdy stuff on to keep me entertained.

The show I found was mildly interesting. Called Last Days on Earth, the program originally aired sometime last year on ABC, but has since been recycled around different networks. It proposed ten ways the planet might be wiped out, interviewed experts, and then proceeded to demonstrate how we all could get blown to kingdom come. Not what you’d call quality television.

The asteroid and global warming scenarios seem to have generated the most discussion online, but they’re kind of old hat by now. What caught my interest was the Yellowstone-caldera-erupts-and-kills-us-all idea. Of course, that one’s not particularly new, either. A lot of folks know that Yellowstone National Park is essentially a giant volcano - one that, fortunately, erupts only every 700,000 years or so - thanks to a profusion of disaster shows like this one that have popped up over the past several years. No, it’s not a new disaster, but when you live in the Black Hills - a mere 400 miles from America’s favorite supervolcano - the thought catches your attention.

It must have caught the attention of the show’s producers, too, because they used Rapid City as their focal point for presenting the scenario. Last Days on Earth interviewed a Rapid City firefighter, then superimposed some shots of falling ash over the top of some very pretty pictures of the Black Hills, suggesting that a Yellowstone eruption could coat the area in eight feet of debris and turn Rapid City into a modern-day Pompeii.

You’ll have to hold off on touring post-apocalyptic Rapid City for at least a little while longer - maybe another 60,000 years, give or take. In the meantime, the Black Hills are a very nice un-volcanic place to visit, and as the show noted, very close to Yellowstone. With only about 400 miles separating them, a lot of travelers combine the two destinations into the same trip.