We left Pine Haven on Sunday morning after watching our respective church services on-line. We took the scenic route around Wyoming thanks to not quite understanding our GPS directions. But we eventually crossed into South Dakota (missing the ‘Welcome to South Dakota’ sign.)
We still made it into Custer Gulch RV Park in the early afternoon, and we relaxed in the park for the rest of the day. Custer’s Gulch campground is just outside Custer State Park.
It was Memorial Day weekend, and this Memorial Day weekend, our niece Catherine and her husband Jeb were celebrating their marriage in Radford, Virginia. All my siblings were celebrating with them, so there was no Sunday evening zoom call. V: We missed being with the family and checked out ways to fly there and back out to SD. We enjoyed the pictures of the festivities.
Monday morning Vicki, Steve and Lexie drove around Custer State Park, taking the wildlife loop. There we saw many, many bison, some pronghorn antelopes, deer, prairie dogs, and wild donkeys. The wild donkeys aren’t so wild. People have been feeding them carrots, and the donkeys are milling around the road waiting for the carrots.
We also saw many rolling hills and many horizontal trees. There was a huge windstorm here in December (according to our RV neighbors Tom and Kali who live in Rapid City) with winds over 100 miles per hour. There were uprooted trees, there were trees that were snapped half way up their trunk! Pictures of broken trees are in the section about Wind Cave National Park.
On Monday afternoon Vicki and Steve drove through Custer State Park and along Iron Mountain Road. This is a scenic highway. “Scenic” means that the driver is going slowly up and down very curvy roads so he isn’t looking at anything but road. And the passenger’s eyes are closed half the time because there is no shoulder on the road, just a drop-off. There were switchbacks and pig’s tails. A pig’s tail is a road that just spirals around itself. There were several one lane bridges (including one that didn’t give one side a chance to see if there was on-coming traffic) and several one lane tunnels. The cool thing about the tunnels (as we were heading north and east) is that you could see Mount Rushmore as you went through them (and weren’t paying attention to the road.) Unfortunately we couldn’t capture Mount Rushmore as framed by the tunnels.
We survived Iron Mountain Road, and arrived at Mount Rushmore. Vicki learned about how they built Mount Rushmore while Steve walked along the Presidential Trail under Mount Rushmore.
After Mount Rushmore we went to the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is a sculpture of Crazy Horse that was started in 1948 and is still under construction. But what has been completed looks great. We were disappointed because they closed the restaurant just as we were about to enter, we spent too much time in the museum section. We were looking forward to Native American food, as advertised, as we loved the Navajo bread and food at the Tribal Pow Wow in Albuquerque.
No native American food that night, we went into Custer and had dinner at Calamity Jane’s Kitchen.
Tuesday morning Vicki and Steve went to Wind Cave National Park (Lexie was happy to stay and watch the RV.)
We weren’t able to tour the cave, so we weren’t able to see the unique cave structures within Wind Cave (e.g. lacework example to the left that was removed from the cave for the display in the visitor center.)
But we did see the plains and hills of the Wind Cave National Park. And we did see more bison. And we did see more ponderosa pines that had been blown over by the windstorm. And we did see fire damaged areas. The ponderosa pines thrive in small fires, most of them are able to regenerate quickly.
Lunch was at the Purple Pie Place in Custer. Vicki had a chicken pot pie, Steve had a pulled pork sandwich. And we finished it off with cherry pie a la mode. V: and everything was purple – walls, chairs, etc. The pot pie was excellent!
Custer’s Gulch Campground is nestled inside the Black Hills National Forest, surrounded with large rock structures that beckon the adventuresome. Steven felt beckoned, and started into the forest across from the RV. He followed a (deer?) trail closer to the big rocks, and walked onto the top of the rock structure. This gave him a great view of his campsite. This also stirred the ire of a big, light colored bird (Peregrine falcon?) that was screeching “Ki-ki-ki” at him. And the falcon moved and screeched again. And it moved a third time. Steven had visions of Tipi Hedren (from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) so he decided to head back to the campsite.
