Sioux Falls Falls Park, SD Live Cam

The Big Sioux River drops over a set of quartzite ledges in the middle of Sioux Falls, in eastern South Dakota. The webcam looks down on the falls and the park around them.

The rock is Sioux quartzite, sandstone compressed and cemented about 1.2 billion years ago into something hard enough to blunt tools; it is pink, and it is why the river falls here instead of cutting a channel.

The ruin above the falls is the Queen Bee Mill, built in 1881 to grind wheat with water power. It ran for a few years and failed: there was never enough wheat coming in, and the river turned out to be too unreliable to drive it.