Steve and Ivy: The Black Hills and the Badlands

We headed off to South Dakota to visit the Black Hills. Our first stop was the town of Spearfish, where we rested for a couple of days and caught up on Internet and such. At the same time, we explored the northern part of the Black Hills, including Spearfish Canyon and the towns of Deadwood and Lead. It was some great country, and the town of Spearfish was quite cute as well, with a nice bike trail by the river, and a pleasant little shopping area.

The Spearfish Canyon drive was quite spectacular. The small river has cut a dramatic narrow gorge through the limestone cliffs, which tower above the road and only allow a couple of hours of sunlight in the gorge itself. The cliffs are hundreds of feet high in places and loom over the road, looking as if they should collapse at any moment onto your car. But you know that they've been there for thousands of years, slowly deepening each year. It's one of the more dramatic canyons I've been in.

The town of Deadwood was very touristy, but an old and colorful place, with some history. We had some lunch there and looked at one of the museums. The town is steeped in Wild West history, but has turned most of it into kitsch or rowdy bars. The buildings are lovely old sandstone, and it's nice to imagine the past there, but hard to see it in the movie-set image that they've built from it. We moved on.

Next we were off to the town of Custer, in the heart of the Black Hills. It is located very close to Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument, and Custer State Park, one of the largest state parks in the US, with the largest herd of buffalo anywhere. There is also a Wild Horse Refuge nearby, which we particularly wanted to see for our granddaughter Kate. So we had a busy stay. We discovered, shortly after we arrived, that the annual Buffalo Roundup in Custer State Park was scheduled for the coming Monday. So we rescheduled our stay and visited the Badlands in a day trip, returning for the roundup.

First, Mount Rushmore. We took a drive there through the Needles Highway, a spectacular drive through some great formations in the Black Hills. It is famous for its tunnels, some of which are barely wide enough for an ordinary pickup truck, though tour bus drivers have apparently learned to negotiate them with inches to spare. The formations along the highway were just as dramatic as the monument itself, and we enjoyed them thoroughly.

The Custer State Park has a lot of wildlife to see along its roads. But one form of not-so-wild life is a herd of burros who have been turned loose to wander the open country Many of these critters have taken to highway robbery and will hold up passing tourists for treats. The two that we encountered had their noses jammed so far into our car that I had trouble focusing the camera enough to get this shot. We paid the toll in Wheat Thins and were allowed to continue.

The next day we were off to the Wild Horse Refuge, some fifty miles south of Custer out on the open range. We had a very amusing and bumpy bus ride tour there, hosted by a chatty and elderly woman from the area who had a lot of stories to tell. It turned out the refuge was loaded with old movie sets from the films Crazy Horse and Hidalgo, which were partially shot there, as well as Native American sites that are still in use for annual ceremonies, such as the Sundance ceremony held in the traditional way. And there were even some wild horses to see, though most of them have been there for years, and many are less than wild. One even tried to climb onto the bus when we got out.
And there was the George Michelson Bike Trail, running over a hundred miles through the Black Hills - one of the first rails-to-trails achievements.

One morning we took a bike ride on the trail, which was quite lovely and peaceful. I would love to ride the entire trail some day. Our host at the Spearfish RV Park was doing that over the weekend, taking her two young boys with her for a family bike ride of three days. What an adventure for some young kids!

We spent a day driving to the Badlands National Park for a visit. The country is spectacular, with elaborate patterns of erosion where the nearby river has scoured the soft earth of the plains over thousands of years. The formations are amazing, and there is apparently a lot of wildlife there, though we didn't see much in our whirlwind tour. There is a long scenic drive through the park with a series of overlooks and viewpoints that we enjoyed. We took a couple of short walks through the formations. There have been a lot of fossils found here, from the inland sea that used to be here millions of years ago.

But we had to get back to attend the annual Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park. This event draws over 10,000 people every year, and this year was no exception. The people outnumbered the buffalo by a factor of ten. There were probably more cowboys herding the buffalo than were absolutely necessary, but it was fun and we got some good pictures and video, as well as chatting with other visitors who were waiting for the show. The buffalo in this large herd are rounded up at this time every year. They are checked for health, vaccinated, and some are selected to be sold off to thin the herd. Most of the bulls are left out in the field, as they cause trouble when rounded up, but the cows and calves are brought in. It was quite a show.