The Black Hills of South Dakota

We left the campground at Medora just before 11:00 headed for Bowman, ND. There we met one of Teressa’s college friends she hadn’t seen in 30 years. Pam went to high school in Billings, grew up in Centerville (by Great Falls – her parents were friends of the Simons, Jayme Wendland’s parents), and married John Beach, a rancher from Baker, MT. They moved into town from the ranch a few years back, where she teaches school and he works for an energy company. It was great fun catching up on everything that has happened in the last 30 years (mostly kids), and reminiscing about college life. Pam is a delightful woman and it was nice of her to make the drive over from Baker to have lunch with us in Bowman.

From Bowman we headed south towards the Black Hills. We were surprised by how green the grasslands were for the middle of August. While there aren’t many trees on the landscape, the rolling hills, distant buttes, and lush grasslands are beautiful in their own right. Obviously the antelope think so, as we must have seen over 500 yesterday in North and South Dakota.

We stopped briefly in Belle Fourche, SD to take our picture by the monument for the Geographic Center of the United States. Apparently if you took a cardboard cutout of the entire US (including Alaska and Hawaii), and then used a pencil underneath to balance the weight, the pencil would be located just north of Belle Fourche. Not exactly the highlight of the trip, but it did make for some interesting conversation in the car regarding the different ways you could calculate the center of the US!

Pam recommended we take the scenic path through the Black Hills, and not the interstate through Rapid City as the GPS would recommend. So we headed directly into the Black Hills towards the town of Deadwood. It immediately became apparent how the town got its name – all the trees on the top of the hills around town are dead, and must have been so for quite some time, given the age of the community. It is quite the contrast to have this quaint western town in the beautiful black hills, surrounded by bleached dead timber standing like sentinels on high. We told the kids they need to go on-line to figure out how this happened. For the first time this trip, I had to drop the trailer in a parking lot in order to get gas. Both the stations in Deadwood had impossibly small entry and exit lanes, and we weren’t sure if there was gas further down the road (of course there was a station with a huge driveway less than 20 miles down the road!).

The drive through the Black Hills was beautiful. Everything is still very green, and it reminded us initially of driving up McDonald Pass, and then later like the highway through the Seeley-Swan. There were a couple of nice lakes (reservoirs actually), and little cabins and tourist stops all along the way. As we got close to Hill City and our KOA campground, we decided to let “Steve”, our Garmin GPS, recommend the way. Steve got his name from his Australian accent, the one the kids picked when we first set up the GPS! Steve was doing great until we got to a major intersection before Hill City, when we thought we should go right, but he recommended we go left. He had never led us too far astray before, so left we went. Next Steve decided we should take some back roads to save time. At least the roads were paved, so our commitment remained strong. After several rights and lefts, Steve alerted us to another right turn just ahead. The problem was it was someone’s personal driveway, and posted on a big tree beside the driveway was a handwritten sign that said “No KOA access”. We assumed it must be the back way into the KOA, and this poor bloke has huge campers trying to cut across his land all day. So we kept going straight down the hill assuming we would round the corner and see the front access to the KOA. It didn’t quite work that way. Steve seemed baffled why we didn’t take the turn he recommended. He suggested we take the next right, which turned out to be a hiking trail. Our confidence in Steve was disappearing quickly. After crossing the same railroad tracks 11 times in less than five miles as we worked our way down the hill towards Keystone, Steve became a four letter word! Finally we made it down to the main road, and while Steve was recommending the correct right turn, the corner was too sharp to take with the trailer, so we ended up going left until we could find a place to turn around, adding another 5 miles to our journey. We eventually arrived at the KOA just before 8 PM, and retired Steve to the glove box for the night!