After leaving Wyoming, we spent three nights at a KOA near the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was lovely to settle in and explore for a couple days!
On Monday, we drove through the town of Hot Springs into Wind Cave National Park. I’m embarrassed to admit that I knew nothing about this park, despite the fact that it was established over 100 years ago and I’ve been to the region at least twice in my life.
We had planned to do a scenic drive through the Black Hills, and then visit Mount Rushmore and the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial. What was intended to be a four-hour jaunt turned into a ten-hour day; once we discovered the national park, there was just too much to see and do!
We continued to be a bit further ahead in our history timeline than we wanted. We explored events of the 1800s and 1900s with our day’s learning, but it was definitely worthwhile to visit these places!
Wind Cave National Park was a pleasant surprise. After the government-sponsored destruction of the bison in the late 1800s, they had been reintroduced to the area in 1913, about ten years after the park was established. So, as we drove through the park, the plains were filled with small groups of bison, deer, and pronghorn, plus lots of prairie dogs calling to each other and scurrying from mound to mound. We also experienced an abundance of aggressive but seemingly harmless insects. The land was oddly peaceful and inviting and we were inspired to stop and explore. Then, once we stopped at the visitors center, we got sucked into a whole fascinating world!
The cave in Wind Cave National Park is accessible from the visitors center through guided tours. Even the fact that the elevators had been down since early summer, making access to the cave impossible, we still learned so much!
The museum downstairs was full of numerous interesting and interactive displays that started with the white man’s discovery of the cave in the late 1800s. It was explored and commercialized as an area attraction and, to this day, more rooms and pathways continue to be uncovered and surveyed. Under a single square mile of surface, multiple levels of tunnels and rooms (totaling over 150 linear miles surveyed to date) make it the seventh largest known cave in the world, and they estimate that only 10% of it has been discovered and surveyed at this point. We learned a lot about the geological processes that formed the cave from the ranger talk. The talk took place at the largest natural entrance to the cave, which looked about as big as a man-hole. We also saw a brief video about the park itself afterwards.
From the visitors center, we drove through the park, towards Mount Rushmore, planning to come back the next day for some hikes. A long and winding road through the Black Hills brought us, after about an hour, to the monument. The kids spent a couple hours learning about the monument and visiting the gift shop, and we took a few pictures, making every effort to recreate the positioning of the four presidents.
We had already spent far longer away from camp than we had planned, but the Crazy Horse Memorial was only a few miles away, and Jon was very eager to visit, having wanted to see it since he was young.
We ended up, not surprisingly, spending far longer than anticipated at Crazy Horse, even though we didn’t arrive until after 4:00. We watched a fascinating video about the man who was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, of the Pine Ridge Reservation, to create the sculpture in stone. The project has been in progress for over half a century, with intense and ongoing work on the mountain sculpture being continued by the sculptor’s children and grandchildren after his death. This work has continued without any federal funding, which has been twice turned down so as not to lose sight and direction of the project’s mission. I remember visiting it as a teenager myself, over 25 years ago, in the early 90s. It was fascinating to see the distinct features of a face (completed in 1998) where I had once seen little more than the vague shape of a man’s head and extended arm.
After the video, we caught the last bus of the evening up to the base of the mountain and got a closer view. Afterwards, we explored the many buildings that comprise the museum, art gallery, and gift shop. We were all intrigued by the story of a monument designated to sharing the importance of an American Indian hero.
When we finally headed back to camp for the evening, it was almost full dark. We drove an hour through the evening and pulled in late. As the girls got warmed up and ready for bed, Jon cooked us up a quick dinner of veggie quesadillas and homemade salsa.
We were excited, on day two of our adventures in the Black Hills, to have nothing on the agenda but biking and hiking! It was also a perfect day to spend outdoors- clear sky, gentle breezes, and temperatures in the high 70s. We headed back to Wind Cave National Park, where we hiked three miles, in and out, on the Cold Brook Canyon Trail. The trail took us through the ponderosa pine forest, alongside a canyon, and across prairie land where we walked next to bison and prairie dogs. It was a beautiful hike!
After a picnic lunch near the visitors center, we went to ride bikes on a four-mile stretch of the Mickelson Trail, which is a rails-to-trails bike path that winds through over 100 miles of the Black Hills. The stretch we chose was gorgeous, but when we headed almost immediately into an awesome, mile-long, downhill portion, we realized that the trip back was not going to be fun! The remaining three miles included some gentle slopes, up and down, so it was a pleasant ride that provided a little bit of a workout. The hill we had cheered our way down was a real challenge to get up on our way back to the truck, but we all made it with minimal whining.
Back at camp, we showered off trail dust and tried to settle into some work. That was interrupted, almost immediately, by my getting stung twice by a yellow jacket that had flown into my shirt! That was bad. Even Daisy, friend to all living creatures and averse to killing anything (including pincher bugs and spiders), now wants vengeance on all yellow jackets on my behalf. After some drama, from me and Daisy equally, and our failure to remove the offending insect, we quickly moved our work station over to the pop-up.
We finished our work with enough time to enjoy dinner outside and an evening by the campfire, chatting with our next door neighbors.
This morning, we got an early (for us) start. We accomplished our goal of driving east as far as possible, all the way across Nebraska. We were in the car for 12 hours, stopping only for necessities. We’re spending tonight in a motel and, tomorrow, planning to visit the railroad museum in Omaha, since we’ve already jumped into the topic of westward expansion.
Afterwards, we aim to drive across Iowa to spend a couple nights at a campground near Effigy Mounds National Monument. We’ll have a chance to return to our study of Native American cultures and learn about the mound builders of the eastern plains. Of course, our plans hinge on the weather. They were preparing for a foot of snow in the Black Hills as we left, and we are now looking forward to two days of rain and thunderstorms in this region, heading eastward. We’ll see what tomorrow brings!
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