By Friday morning a lot of our fellow campers had packed and headed out, with a fresh batch likely to arrive in the afternoon. Although Hill City is a good hour or more away from Sturgis and the rally was a few weeks out, the motorcycles and trailers were beginning to arrive. One of the locals told me that it’s really a month-long event and that Hill City is transformed.
After a quick run with Timber, we drove over to Wind Cave National Park to tour the 162-mile long cave. The drive itself took us through Custer State Park, nothing we’d read much about prior to our travel but that should be added to anyone’s itinerary. It is stunning, one of the most incredible surprises of the trip so far – a mix of prairie, rivers and lakes, ponderosa pine-studded hills and spruce forests. The rocks, lichen-mottled granite formations that rose up like fingers stretching toward heaven or haphazardly at acute angles, had such high crystal content in them they sparkled in the sunlight.
We drove through Needles and six one-car-wide tunnels that were blown out of gigantic rocks in the park. One of the tunnels, nicknamed the Needles Eye, was 100 yards long and 8 feet wide with protruding granite spurs that attempted to cut the unwary driver’s vehicle in half. It wasn’t easy getting the F-350 through it unscathed.
We saw white-tailed deer and mule deer, enormous herds of bison on a ridge and pronghorns nestled down in the thick grass all riding out the rains that were rolling through the area. Just as a powerful thunderstorm rolled in, we descended beneath the grasslands into Wind Cave for the Fairgrounds Tour. This one-and-a-half mile tour starts 220’ beneath the surface and has approximately 450 stairs. Ronan, who has grown on this trip, knocked his head a couple of times on the low cave ceilings. The tour was fine and the cave was fascinating. We walked into large chambers where a single rock that used to be the ceiling had collapsed into the middle, creating a house-size mound. We saw boxwork rock formations as well as “popcorn” and “frostwork.”
Following the tour, we stopped at the gift shop to buy postcards and for the boys to get a bit goofy. The drive back through the park gave us another chance to see animals – small herds of pronghorn deer grazed in fields and feral donkeys backed up traffic. We stopped off in Custer for dinner and headed home for the night.
