By Scott Shephard

Year’s ago, when a Minnesota-born principal at Watertown High School referred to the kind of lakes you are looking at here as “prairie potholes,” I was offended. I took his meaning as: “You don’t have ‘real’ lakes in South Dakota but Minnesota does.” 10,000 of them, I guess . . . We know better than to call them potholes, though. We call this whole area in the northeast part of our state the Glacial Lakes Region, which actually extends well beyond South Dakota.

When I look at this photo, taken in late June, 2019, the thing that I think of first is that it must be very challenging to farm this land, especially in a year like this when some parts of our state have had 3 times the normal amount of rainfall. I suspect that in dry years these “lakes” shrink or maybe even disappear. But in 2019, if you owned the land just across the narrow isthmus beyond that field that has the hay bales, you’d have a long drive to get there.

Mavic 2 Pro Hasselblad L1D-20c 1/400s f/5.0 ISO100 10.26mm (35mm eq:28mm)