Wild, Wild West

Monday, August 10

• Needles Highway
• Custer State Park
• Mount Rushmore
• Keystone
• Badlands

Well, we woke up in Hill City, SD without a clear plan, but Jason grabbed a map and made one for us (it was remarkably similar to the one I had suggested before we even got here). We started with a drive to Custer State Park in the morning. We took Needles Highway to get there, as suggested by my sister’s new husband’s family and they were right. What a drive. Snaking along this mountaintop in the Black Hills, you drive through these granite spires that reach up into the sky from among the pine trees and they were awesome. Some looked like gnome hats and others like piles of rocks on top of each other. The road gets it’s name from one in particular that looks like a needle with a threading hole up at the top.

Once we got down from the mountaintop, we started driving along Wildlife Loop Road through Custer State Park. We were stopped in the road by bison. One stared Jason down for a while, we think because he ate one of his friends at that restaurant in Deadwood last night.  When we finally got going again, we saw mules waiting for us on the side of the road. Apparently these mules were not indigenous to the park, but are the descendants of mules brought here to pull people to the tops of the hills, then when they weren’t needed anymore, they were simply set free to roam in the park. We pulled over to pet them when Jason, Jade and I saw a herd of something off in the distance, so we decided to go check it out. After walking through a prairie dog town (that what fields of prairie dogs are called) we came up to a little watering hole wih pronghorns drinking from it. I can’t believe how close we got to them, but it was so cool. We could hear the prairie dogs around us, chirping like birds, while watching these pronghorns drink from a big puddle. It was quite an experience. As we drove on we saw more wildlife, but nothing compared to that.

After Custer, we took the short drive to Mount Rushmore and we could see it along the drive occasionally through the trees along the way. When we actually got there, it was pretty cool to see how massive it was, but we listened to a tour guide and it kind of brought us off the high we had been feeling about loving this country. You see, all of the Black Hills were supposed to belong to the Lakota Indians, we signed a treaty with them allowing them to have this land, until gold was found here. That’s when towns like Deadwood came to be and the US pushed the Indians onto reservations in the desert. The guide told us that for the South Dakotans, they live with that conflict still because technically, that land is still disputed. In fact, the US Supreme Court even ruled in the Lakotans favor and ruled that the US government pay them $2.5 Million, but they refused the money because they want their land. Right now there is a bond in escrow waiting for them to take that has increased with interest to over $8 Billion, and they can take it whenever they want. It’s kind of sad to think we’ve carved up their mountains and stamped it forever like this.

 Next, we stopped in a little town called Keystone and that downtown was more of what we expected Deadwood to be. Sure it was touristy, but it looked like an old west town. We ate pizza and ice cream while sitting outside and taking in the sites, then got back in the car and headed for The Badlands. Jason sang us some Bruce on the boring drive. Boring until we pulled into The Badlands. We didn’t really knowing what to expect, and immediately we were in awe of the landscape. The jagged, colorfully striped rock formations went on for as far as the eye could see and they just started from along a grassland prairie. You drive along boring grass and suddenly you come to this. It blew us away. Jade and Jason climbed far into these peaks and my mother, aunt and I couldn’t believe it. Jade was like a mountain goat out there. We had to be careful though, because signs clearly warned us about the rattlesnakes everywhere. We drove through stopping at all the viewpoints and Jade and Jason got out and climbed some more. The pictures just don’t do it any justice. It’s one of those things that cameras simply cannot capture. As uninhabitable as it all looked, he Lakota lived here, too. They used this terrain to their advantage when hunting the bison that once live here. In fact, this land was inhabited for over 10,000 years, there are fossils of mammoth hunting tribes dated that far back. So cool.

We were sad to leave The Badlands, but after watching the sunset over the cool peaks, we had no choice. We dove home, but to top it all off, Jason and I saw a shooting star in the clear sky right in front of us. I’m not kidding. Crazy.