Road Trip - Custer State Park

Custer State Park

We woke to raindrops splattering the tent. We got up quickly and packed up the campsite before it started bucketing down.

Our first stop of the day was for a coffee at Wolf Camp, a campsite for motorcyclists. We were entertained by a young boy and his gang of sausage dogs who lived at the camp!

We drove the Wildlife Loop Road, a 29km scenic byway through rolling hills and pine forest inside of the Black Hills' Custer State Park.

We spotted deer, donkey, prairie dogs and bison. As the road meandered out of the State Park boundaries we also spotted camels and lamas in private farms.

We had heard about these donkeys from the custodian at our campsite. Apparently they are are fearless and well fed by tourists!

It took us a while (and an information brochure) to work out what these creatures were! Kind of rodent like, but also kind of like squirrels. Prairie dogs live in 'towns' with expansive networks of underground tunnels. At each tunnel entrance are small mounds of dirt on which the prairie dogs stand guard.

As we walked through the field to take a closer look (there was a dirt track and quite a few people walking through the field), we could hear the prairie dogs making strange squeaking/barking sounds. We later learned that this is their warning call and maybe they didn't like us being that close.

Wind Cave National Park

Our next stop of the day was at Wind Cave National Park. We joined a guided tour of the cave lead by a Park Ranger. All the rangers we have encountered are immensely knowledgeable, and have helped us to better appreciate what we are looking at. If ever there is an opportunity to hear from a ranger, we take it!

Prior to entering the cave we were quizzed about whether we had been into any other caves in the clothes and shoes we were wearing. Any dirt tourists carry into the cave can effect the ecosystem within it; at Wind Cave they were particularly concerned with people carrying a fungus causing White Nose Syndrome, which has killed millions of bats across North America.

Wind Cave is named after the wind that blows out of a hole in the ground marking the entrance to the cave. It is this wind that lead to the caves discovery. There is no actual wind in the cave however. Strange. This cave is part of a much bigger network of caves, some of which are still unexplored.

This cave is home to 98% of the worlds know examples of boxwork. This is a rock formation that is incredibly fragile and forms in a honeycomb like structure.

"The boxwork fins once filled cracks in the rock before the host cave formed. As the walls of the cave began to dissolve away, the more resistant vein and crack fillings did not, or at least dissolved at a slower rate than the surrounding rock, leaving the calcite fins projecting from the cave surfaces."

As we walked through the cave, we took over 300 steps down concrete steps before taking an elevator back up. The steps and handrails were illuminated by the lights which were pointing towards the rock formations, crevices, nooks and crannies and down other branches of the cave network.

During the tour we learnt about early explorers of the cave and the tours they ran in the early days, where groups of tourists would get lost!

After exploring Wind Cave, we were eager to see more! We drove not far down the road to Jewel Cave National Park, which has some beautifully coloured and textured rock formations. Unfortunately, we arrived too late in the day and missed the last tour.

Crazy Horse Monument

Next stop was Crazy Horse Monument. This is an insane project to carve a man riding a horse into the mountain.

Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota chief, and well-known elder in the Native American community, recruited and commissioned Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to build the Crazy Horse Memorial in 1931, in response to Mount Rushmore. The memorial is named after a famous Lakota warrior from the 19th Century who lead the fight against White American settlers on Native American land.

The visitors building was a strange, eclectic mix of tourist centre, museum, cinema, artists studio and university. It was all kind of kitchy, like an op-shop.  Very weird. And very expensive.

The monument has been under construction for decades, as funding and leadership for the project comes and goes. Construction is underway at the moment and for an additional $150 each you can take a bus ride to the shoulder of the monument. Ha!

Deadwood

We drove through the small town of Deadwood. As we drove down the main road, some men ran onto the road and reenacted the capture of Jack McCall who had just murdered Wild Bill Hickok. I was shocked they were shooting actual guns, all just for entertainment! Crazy people. Sean knew of the town based on a TV show and was excited to be there is real life - apparently it looked just like the TV set! To me it was like Las Vegas in another era; casinos, cheap hotels and souvenir shops.

We stopped in Spearfish for dinner at Dough Traders Pizza (yum), before arriving at KOA Devil's Tower after dark. This was another one of those drives where we had no idea what we we're driving through. However, the full moon lit up Devils Tower from behind and we watched its silhouette get bigger and more impressive as we approached!

We arrived after dark and the office was closed. Our campsite details were left on a clipboard by the door. We found a spot next to the WiFi tower and popped our tent for the night.