Spearfish Canyon and Custer State Park

This is us at Elkhorn RV Resort. It is expensive, but the sites are lovely, as you can see. Note the wonderful steps next to the motorhome. Kevin is determined I don’t fall down the motorhome steps again! I should have taken the picture at a different angle so you could see the hills around us. Oops!

Blue skies too

You can’t stay in Spearfish and not drive the gorgeous scenic byway down Spearfish Canyon! We spent most of Wednesday in the car, but it was worth it.

Forested hills the entire way
Craggy rocks are underneath the trees
Very craggy!
This waterfall was right by the road

The scenery doesn’t disappoint after the byway either.

Lake Sheridan on the way to Custer State Park

You go through the old mining town of Lead, SD the way we drove. The locals pronounce is “Leed,” and it has historic sites all over the place. The Homestake Mine was the deepest and biggest gold mine in North America. It was discovered during the Black Hills gold rush of 1876, and was in production until 2002. It now serves as an underground scientific laboratory, and it was where neutrinos were discovered.

Ruins of the famous Homestake Mine mill in Lead, SD

We eventually arrived at Custer State Park. Lots of rocks, hills, and trees, and absolutely lovely.

Rocky crags similar to those of Mount Rushmore before carving
Classic Custer – trees and rocks

The most famous drive in Custer is the Neeldes Highway. It has six one lane, low narrow tunnels carved into the rock, restricting it to passenger vehicles only. You can get an idea in these two pictures.

There is a reason for the name “Needles Highway.”
This is one of the bigger tunnels
Views for miles

We ate lunch at the historic State Game Lodge where Presidents Coolidge and Eisenhower spent time in the summers. They had a very nice buffet, but I had planned on one of their traditional bison burgers! The buffet was a quite acceptable alternative though. We came back through the craziness that is Keystone (just outside Mount Rushmore) and Deadwood. I try to stay away from both. I just can’t get excited about Rushmore. We have seen it, and the carvings are interesting, but I much prefer more natural sights. And Deadwood is just the definition of a tourist trap! Come to think of it, so is Keystone.

Oh, and I found a great little quilt store in Spearfish. I bought backing for my great niece’s baby quilt, and the lovely women said I could use their tables to sandwich it! Fabulous news, and I will do that on Friday.

We have to move sites tomorrow from this huge pull through site to a large back in due to their reservation mixup. I have discovered a car wash that has an oversized outside bay we are hoping to wash the motorhome in. The poor baby is absolutely filthy. So tomorrow we will move the Jeep to the new site, then take the MH for a wash. When we  get back and set up, I will go sandwich my quilt.

Southern Black Hills

We have a lovely campsite at Angostura State Recreation Area. There are actually 6 separate campgrounds. On the west side of the reservoir is a small regular campground and a horse camp. On the east side, where we are, there are four campgrounds. We are in Cascade campground, the second from the north. Lots of trees, a very nice toilet and shower building, playground for kids, and access to a really nice bike trail make it a good choice. I took some pictures at night, but I haven’t taken any good day time pictures around they campground. I will try to do that tomorrow. Here is one with the full moon poking through the trees last night though.

We have taken some nice drives so far. We went to Rapid City for a prescription refill, and we went through part of Wind Cave National Park. It is a different view of the Black Hills showing the prairies that are intermixed with the mountains. Gorgeous!

We also went into Custer State Park to drive the Wildlife Loop toward Rapid City. It did not disappoint! Turkeys, prairie dogs, deer, pronghorn, donkeys, and, of course, bison.

The bison were actually crossing the road, and they caused a massive traffic jam. We were luckily heading north and only had 5-6 cars dead stopped in front of us. The road heading south was ‘bison jammed’ for at least a mile. Another interesting thing was that there were bulls in the middle of the nursery herd. They were definitely creating harems. The bulls aren’t often with the cows and calves – only when they are getting ready to mate. One big guy, on the right in the picture just above, had collected at least three cows, and he was giving low bellows trying to attract even more.

Today we just hung around the coach and took a quick trip into Hot Springs. There is an aptly named “Skyline Drive” we took toward the top of Battle Mountain. It was definitely a high clearance road due to the wash outs, but the view downhill was lovely.

This picture shows the old sanitarium, now a VA center, and a part of the National Cemetery. The red sandstone buildings are a feature of Hot Springs. Before our common pain medicines were known, hot springs were the primary treatment for most joint and muscle issues so there were a number of sanitariums in the area.

We also had a nice dinner cooked outside. Kevin grilled steaks on the Volcano charcoal stove, and I cooked potatoes and onions on the camp stove. Note mine just got put on the grill. I like medium rare;Kevin prefer medium. We added some garlic butter right at the end and it was delicious.

It isn’t a very big grill, but it uses only a few briquettes and works fine for the two of us. The whole thing, including an adaptor for propane, fits in a small bag for storage. Storage is important for traveling!

Tomorrow we intend on driving up to Hill City and wandering about that area some.

Family trip to Black Hills

I am way behind on documenting this trip, and I know I will forget some things. I had no cell service for much of it, and I didn’t even take very many pictures that I can post.

We left home on Wednesday, 7 June, for a big family get together in South Fakota. The first night we stayed at Flaming Gorge in a lovely campground named Lucerne near Manila, UT. Kevin made a reservation at the last minute to guarantee a lake front site with electricity. Cost was around $20 since the electricity was from a concessionaire. We had a lovely view of the lake and surrounding hills plus ok phone and data service. We just enjoyed the view from the recliners while under the trailer awning. It was a lovely start.

The next morning we headed to the Bighorn National Forest and found a spot at Boulder Park on the west side of the park. Absolutely no cell service, but a gorgeous mountain forest site. There were quite a few sites with long pads, but we had some trouble with narrow entry roads that weren’t wide enough to back in the site. Cost was a whopping $8 with our Senior Pass. We enjoyed the roaring creek providing all the white noise we could manage that night. On Friday morning I had a medical issue arise (lots of brand new “floaters” in my left eye) so we headed to Gillette on the east side of the NF to find an eye doctor. The very helpful Gillette Optometric Clinic worked me in on a busy Friday afternoon. I really appreciated the thoroughness of Dr. Fischer was did the examination. Turns out I had a vitreous detachment, fairly normal for someone of my age, but there is a 10% risk of a serious retinal issue in the next month so I need an ophthalmologist. He did say it was ok to continue with the vacation as long as I am aware of the symptoms and know where to find an emergency room with an ophthalmologist on call. This trip that is basically Rapid City! (I have already made an appointment for a follow up with the Moran Eye Center in SLC.) The only immediate issue is the huge bother of numerous dark floaters in my eye, one right dead center. Sigh. Supposedly they will get better in the next 3-6 months.

We stayed at the KOA next to Devil’s Tower Friday night. We didn’t even do any hiking, since I was emotionally exhausted and Kevin’s knee was really acting up. It was nice to have full hookups before going to a dry camping site (the family get together) for a week. Cost was somewhere around $35 or so for an older campground that definitely makes its money on tourists stopping for Devil’s Tower. One of the unusual thing they do is play the move “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” every evening. The movie centers around Devil’s Tower, and we saw a number of people heading that way. We have seen the move a number of times, so I didn’t feel the urge to see it this time.

Saturday was check in at the vacation rental we were staying at. Since the cabin was just outside of Spearfish and we spent the night only an hour away, we really dawdled leaving the KOA. We then decided to drive around some of the Black Hills since we couldn’t get to the rental until 4:00. We had a nice lunch at a cute diner in Hills City across from the school. I can’t remember the name because the sign out front just said “Diner”. We also looked at the railroad museum there. I wish I had thought to make reservations for the short train ride, but I totally forgot.

The vacation rental included one main cabin and a separate bunkhouse, each with two bedroom spaces. My oldest son’s family (including their three kids) took the bunkhouse, my daughter and her husband and baby took the upstairs bedroom in the main cabin, and my second son (single) took the second bed in the cabin. The cabins were in the woods, but there was a lovely meadow nearby where we parked the trailer. The new power converter Kevin installed a month or two back seemed to maintain the battery better than we expected. We were in a canyon without any cell service unless we had the cell booster turned on. With the booster we occasionally got two dots of LTE service on our Verizon phones. Just as often we would get one dot of 1X – voice but no data. We somehow burned out the transformer on our booster after the first day, but Kevin found one at a local store that worked just fine. One of the reasons I don’t have many pictures on this post is that I don’t like posting pictures of other people on a public site, and I did take lots of pictures of the family! We alternated spending a day primarily at the cabin with a day that had some sightseeing or exploring. It seemed to work out well for the little kids.

The last night at the cabin was Thursday, and everyone was gone by 10:00 on Friday morning. Kevin and I decided we wanted to stay in the Black Hills another day to do some sightseeing and relaxing. We ended up at the Rafter J, a really great private campground. It was also expensive at around $65. For that we got full hookups (including cable) and a pull through gravel site with lots of grass around it plus room to enjoy sitting outside. It rained quite a bit though, just like it had a lot of the week. We did get a chance to go through Spearfish Canyon and the Needles Highway though.

We had planned on staying in Rawlins, WY at the Walmart on Saturday night, but there wasn’t room in the parking lot! By 4:00 when we arrived there were already 3 vehicles with big trailers pulled in plus one pickup camper, and it has a small parking lot. We decided to go on to Rock Springs, and I am now in the Walmart lot there. It just kills me to pay $30-40 to just park for a night since we don’t need utilities, and I knew we would never find a public campground on a Saturday night in the summer. There is a lot of highway noise but no brakes or trains, so it should be ok when we close the trailer up to sleep. Continuous road noise acts likes white noise to me and doesn’t keep me awake. We should be home fairly early tomorrow since it is only four hours or so. Sometime on Sunday I will edit add a post with some pictures, but I wanted to write what I could now. Monday we will do laundry, go through the mail, and head to Bozeman on Tuesday to help my son move so we won’t be home long. I intend on being back Thursday night with a utility trailer full of his stuff while Kevin will stay until Friday. I am coming back early for the appointment with the ophthalmologist, and hoping for a good report.