My family and I went on a road trip this Summer with our pop-up camper and stayed at lots of parks from Georgia to Wyoming. At each place we stayed at, I asked the Park Rangers what the dumbest questions they've ever gotten from tourists have been. I only hope that asking about dumb questions can't be considered a dumb question.

Jewel Cave National Monument

"How much of the cave is underground?" Ahem. It's all underground, that's why it's a cave.

"Where are the Buffalo?" (after just driving past 240 of them)

During a tour of the Jewel cave, after the Ranger had explained the rules about not touching anything in the cave because it was fragile and so on, someone asked, "I know this is just a replica of the actual cave, but are we anywhere close to the real one?"

Crazy Horse Memorial

A tourist purchased a ticket for the bus ride down to the bottom of Crazy Horse, but when the bus got there and everyone else was standing around taking pictures, she asked the bus driver, "What happened to the other three heads?" Obviously she believed she was at Mount Rushmore, despite all the huge signs saying "Crazy Horse" and the bus driver's spiel about the history of Crazy Horse Memorial.

"What do you do with the mountain in the Winter?"

Someone on our bus asked why there were lines drawn on the mountain, defining what the mountain would look like when it's finished (it's not completed yet). Maybe, he thought, that was for showing what part the workers would carve out next? The bus driver replied, "No, it's not for the workers, but more for the visitors. Before they painted that line, some people couldn't tell which end of the horse was which."

Wind Cave National Park

On the way into the park, you drive past hundreds and hundreds of prairie dog mounds with prairie dogs climbing all over them. You can't miss it. So a ranger was surprised when someone asked him where the prairie dogs were. It turned out they were from the city and had never seen prairie dogs before, so they had always envisioned them as skinny, large, coyote-like animals--like a wild dog, because of the name! I'd never seen a prairie dog in my life before that day, but I knew what they looked like and they sure don't look like coyotes.

Mount Rushmore National Monument

"I understand how they carved the heads, but once they were carved how did they get them up there?"

"You know, you really don't publicize this place enough. What you should do is you should take the heads down, put them on a flat bed truck, and drive them around the U.S. Then when you have some more people coming, just stick 'em back up there."

"Is it true that Mount Rushmore belongs to Japan?"

Some days at Mount Rushmore, it's too foggy to see the heads. So one day a person remarked, "You need to buy some big fans and like blow the fog away so everybody can see the heads."

"Where's the elevator to take you to Washington's eye?"

Rushmore Cave

"Is this where they store Mount Rushmore in the Winter?"

Custer State Park

"What do you do with the Buffalo at night?"

Someone asked where the buffalo were. The ranger replied, "You should see them along this road among the trees." An hour later the people came back, looking suspicious and mad at the ranger, and said to him fiercely, "There's no way those giant animals could fit in the trees!" They had misinterpreted the ranger's words to mean that the buffalo were actually in the trees.

A foreign tourist came into the ranger's office one day and asked, "Where are the Dangaroos?" The rangers were trying to figure out what he meant, when the man said, "Right there on the sign outside, it says, 'Buffalo are Dangeroos'!" The sign actually said, "Buffalo are Dangerous" but the visitor, who did not speak English very well, thought that meant that another name for Buffalo was "Dangaroos".

"Are those Buffalo outside animatronic?" Erm, yes. And so are the huge buffalo pats lying around about every two feet. Suuure, hun.