1982 South Dakota (8/20-21/1982)

Friday, August 20, 1982

Headed out of Cody shortly after 8:00 on US 16 and zoomed across the cattle plains. At Greybull, WY US 16 turned south and at Worland, WY it turned east again. We switchbacked across the mountains, following Ten Sleep Canyon.

Having to follow a "Pilot Car" truck

Deer

We saw animals, but they turned out to be more cattle. Often we had to stop and wait for cattle to cross the road. Many meandered across and some stopped to study the yellow stripe before continuing across! In Buffalo, WY we joined Interstate 90. We were listening to a Buffalo radio station, and they were pronouncing the town name the way native Buffalo, New Yorkers would say it.

A long highway through rolling hills of cattle ranches. Somewhere along the way, I yelled out “deer!” taking a few seconds to get out what I really meant: pronghorn. We backed up and now had to use binoculars to confirm that they were Antilocapra americana/Pronghorns. We saw several more groups of pronghorns, interspersed with huge cattle herds, scattered all across the wide plains.

Antilocapra americana/Pronghorns

Pronghorn

At about Gillette, WY, we began seeing signs along I-90 for Wall Drug, but we didn’t give it much thought. At Moorcroft, WY, we turned south on US 16. As we bypassed Newcastle, WY, we smelled an awful stench, like an unbearably strong odor of excrement. Slaughterhouses? It was terrible.

We entered South Dakota and the Black Hills National Forest, where the mountains were thick with forests. In Custer, SD, US 16 turned north, and we turned east on South Dakota State Route 244 to Mount Rushmore. At every curve we craned our necks in anticipation of seeing the memorial, and finally rounded a parking lot to see Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln way up on the face of Mount Rushmore. Pretty neat!

We headed up Alternate US 16 to Keystone, SD, a rinky-dink tourist trap. The AAA motels were already full, so we went to Brookside Motel to get a room for $32. Our room was actually down the street in a duplex house. We parked in the back and had half the lower floor. It was modern and clean, but no bars of soap. Oh, it had dispensers of liquid soap! Kathy took the king-size bed and I took the twin. We went to a restaurant based on the menu left in our room, and it was across town near the aerial tram station and the whirlybird heliport. I had a hamburger with hash browns, and Kathy had a barbecue rib sandwich with fries.

The motel manager had recommended the 3-1/2 minute helicopter ride, so every time the helicopter took off across the street, we timed it. It averaged 3 minutes a trip. I watched the helicopter’s flight pattern, and at one point it seems to hover, then dive down a bit. For the thrill, I guess! There was also a tiny train circling the town, carrying silly tourists.

After eating, we walked around town, stopping in all the gift/souvenir shops. We got some fudge and licorice sticks. The shops sold a lot of typical junky souvenirs, but also lots of gold jewelry made from local gold. The local style of jewelry was rather gaudy. Lots of grape leaves with specks of green and pink sprinkled in. There were also a lot of rocks for sale. Many minerals are mined in the Black Hills, such as gold, silver, copper, and others. At the tiny post office, Kathy called her parents from an outdoor phone booth.

We continued exploring. One shop had a pet tarantula.

We drove back to the motel to write postcards, when Kathy remembered something she forgot to tell her parents. So we found another outdoor phone booth. We kept driving to Mount Rushmore for the evening presentation. There was no fee to park and we found a space. Walked up the path lined with state and territory flags to the visitors center which is cooled and heated by the sun’s energy. From the terrace we could see the stone memorial in the dusk. We walked down the many stairs into the amphitheater and got seats. Darkness fell as we waited. Kathy and I saw a shooting star.

About 15 minutes before the show, a ranger came out to informally answer questions. The fellow was very good, and the questions were even good ones! At 21:00, the ranger said that Teddy Roosevelt was coming to visit with us, and he yelled out, “Teddy, what do you think of Mount Rushmore?”

I looked toward the darkened podium expecting “Teddy” to pop up there, when I was startled by a booming voice in the aisle next to me, shouting, “It’s bully!” A good likeness to Teddy ambled down to the stage to give a half-hour monologue about the four presidents represented and why. Washington: the founding father, Jefferson: the Declaration of Independence and expansion through the Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln: for preserving the Union, and Roosevelt: for bringing the U.S. into international affairs and further expansion, as well as for conservation. We learned a bit about the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. At one point Teddy was reminiscing and shouted, “Chaaaarge!” which bothered a baby behind us. His finale was to point dramatically at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial which was then lighted up! We tried taking time exposures of the lighted memorial like many others, but unlike the many using flash!

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

We walked up to the area of Borglum’s studio, then back to the car to drive to the motel.

Saturday, August 21, 1982

We left at 8:00 and went practically next door to be the first customers at the Big Thunder Gold Mine. We had to wait for the 8:30 tour after buying the $3.50 tickets and wandering the souvenir shop. A girl unlocked a wooden building and ushered the two of us in. We sat on wooden benches to watch a slide presentation with audio tape narration. It was long and drawn out about the wonders of Keystone. The new town is for tourists, but there is the old town where out motel was, with a general store, school, and working mine. A brief geological survey of the area, then the history (a gold rush of sorts). As soon as the show was over, a man opened a door and told us to go down the path and wait in the shelter. We sat on benches looking at a contraption which turned out to be a hauling machine for vertical mines. The girl came out in a ski jacket with electric lanterns and paper bags. She opened the wooden gate in front of the hole in the cliff, after giving us a brief history of the mine. As we walked into the mine, we were shown a room of explosives, ore cars, and flat sheets on which the ore is dumped to allow easier shoveling than on the rocky floor surface. The mine was in solid rock and did not need supports like a coal mine. We arrived at a room where there was a gold ore vein, and it was explained that there is no such thing as a vein of gold, though a mother lode may seem to be. The veins were of gold ore, rock containing gold that is mined and taken out to be smelted down for the gold. It takes 10 tons of ore to get an ounce of gold!

We were given a hammer and chisel, and a paper bag, and allowed to chip away at the gold ore vein. The ore contained quartz, graphite, iron pyrite (fool’s gold), and hopefully, gold. The room had a curious smell, which the girl said was graphite. Kathy and I were the only “miners” at the time, and the girl conversed with us. After getting a few chips shiny with fool’s gold, we left. In the gift shop, I bought some placers (panned gold flakes). We asked about panning, but you could only do that in troughs, not actually in the stream.

We left the gold mine and drove to the other side of Keystone to the heliport. We saw the options: 1) for kids - the 3-1/2 minute thrill ride, 2) for Mom & Dad - the 7-minute ride, and 3) the comprehensive 20-minute ride. We decided on the cheapest one and plunked out $10 each for the thrill ride. We were ushered out to the Bell helicopter with a bench seat under a large clear bubble. I sat in the middle and Kathy sat next to the clear acrylic door. We were buckled in and noted the stickers on the foot pedals in front of us read: “Not footrests!” The pilot hopped in next to me, revved up the engine, and swoop, we were off! We turned to head to Mount Rushmore a mile away, then turned towards the right. We headed right at a hill, then whoop!, we went up and over for a roller coaster feeling. We turned and hovered, nose slightly down, then dropped down while banking to the right. Whoa! We circled back to the heliport and pivoted for a pinpoint landing. Quite an experience, but one shouldn’t do this ride in order to see Mount Rushmore!

Crooked view of Mount Rushmore from helicopter

We drove to the Mount Rushmore parking lot and walked over to the terrace for daylight photos of the memorial.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

We wandered through the gift shop which had the typical souvenirs, Indian crafts, as well as Christmas ornaments, and English china. I joked that I was surprised they didn’t have German Hummels. The next counter had Hummels!

We backtracked up US 16 to Keystone and on to Rapid City, SD for a bank stop.

We got on I-90 east, and every quarter mile we saw those billboards for Wall Drug, each offering something different: homemade pie, a 6-ft. rabbit, free maps, free coffee for missile crews, giant dinosaur, art gallery, etc., etc. Some billboards claimed Wall Drug had been written up in various national magazines. So we were convinced that we, too, had to visit the largest drugstore in the world!

We arrived at the parking lot welcoming everyone except airplanes and helicopters! There were several entrances and we managed to pick the one that went into the actual drugstore section. The whole block was taken up with connected buildings full of T-shirts, souvenirs galore, jewelry, western clothing and shoes, postcards, etc. There was a diorama of mechanical dummy cowboy bands and we watched a couple. There were games such as a quick-draw shoot-out with a dummy. A counter full of information brochures, stuffed animals (including a jackalope), food, etc. You could buy one of their small billboard signs to take home. Some people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t as big as they thought. Somehow for me, it was what I pictured, even bigger and better!

We took South Dakota Route 240 south past an abandoned commercial Indian village with a prairie dog town. We saw a few stray prairie dogs among the mounds in the overgrown area.

We paid $1 to enter the Pinnacles area of Badlands National Park.

Badlands National Park receipt

We wondered what Badlands are, just this flat prairie grassland with a few bit of rocks seen on the horizon? We passed several side roads that were not recommended for the ordinary car, being impassable when wet, etc. Then ahead of us, a huge area had eroded, and we saw that the Badlands are below the level of the grasslands! We stopped at a couple points overlooking the eroded areas that looked like dirt hoodoos and needles; pinnacles, I guess! Very delicate and you were warned to keep away from the edges that crumble easily. Farther along were some neat colored layers. So all to one side was the flat grassland, and to the other the land dropped away into the Badlands.

Badlands National Park

Pinnacles Overlook panorama

Panorama Overlook

Panorama Overlook

It was extremely hot so we didn’t stop at every overlook. At the Fossil Exhibit Trail, we took a thermos of ice water to walk the quarter mile. The trail had Plexiglas covered fossils. They weren’t the trilobites that Kathy expected, but mammal bones from a later era. We saw several skulls of early hares, rhinos, and one horse, and a turtle shell. We heard movement in a small bush near a pile of rocks and discovered a frightened cottontail.

We hopped back in the car for air-conditioning and drove past a few areas that actually rose above the grasslands, and exited the park. On I-90, we headed west and saw the all the Wall Drug signs in this direction, before seeing the giant plastic dinosaur in Wall, SD. We stopped for gas and a car wash, which only cleaned off the superficial dirt on the car, not the huge chucks of dirt hanging from the bottom.

Saw herds of cattle and herds of pronghorn. Headed back to Rapid City, then south on SD 79 to US 385 into Nebraska. Al along the way we could see a lightning rainstorm to our left. It was heading in the same direction as we were, but more slowly. The Chadron radio station predicted rain and we could see it was coming!

We turned west on US 20 where it became more hilly, with a lone tree here and there. More clumps of trees meant we were near the Nebraska National Forest. We passed through Fort Robinson State Park, which seemed to be a nicely maintained land around a modern “fort” of the U.S. Army. We planned to get gas in Harrison, NE, but the two stations were already closed. Instead we turned south on NE 29. We saw two cars stopped on the road, one headed in each direction, and as we passed between them, we saw a coiled snake behind the one car. A man was waving at the snake and threw a magazine at him. We hope his intent was to scare the snake off the road so he wouldn’t become road kill.

We entered the gravel road of the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. We were just ambling along when Kathy swerved and hit the brakes. She had seen a snake, lying there in a wiggily formation across the road. We backed up so Kathy could take a photo from her rolled down window and the snake cooperated by not moving.

Crotalus scutulatus/Mojave Rattlesnake

We noticed the snake flickering his tongue, but he stopped when Kathy wanted a picture of it. She carefully opened her door to gather a few pebbles from the road, and tossed them at the snake. No tongue. So I opened my door and stomped to scare away any snakes under the car (!), and gathered a handful of pebbles. I got in the back seat, but because the back window doesn’t roll down, I had to toss the pebbles out of Kathy’s window. A bit awkward, and I wasn’t helping to alert the snake at all until I accidentally beaned him. Kathy got her picture!

Then for some reason Kathy decided to step out of the car! We had already positively identified him as a Crotalus scutulatus/Mojave Rattlesnake! As soon as Kathy stepped out of the car, the head perked up and whipped his head around in our direction. Kathy was back in the car and rolling up the window in a flash! The snake maintained his new pose.

Crotalus scutulatus/Mojave Rattlesnake with tongue out

We saw a jeep barreling towards us, leaving a lot of dust behind him, so we drove off. Continued through the plains of the Agate Fossil Beds to the visitors center. We knew they had closed at 17:00, but we rushed to the restrooms, hoping they were accessible. Yes, and they were clean and modern, the nicest restrooms so far on the trip! Actually we didn’t quite run to the restrooms because we were on the lookout for rattlesnakes!

They had a self-guided tour through the brush to two hills where animal fossils could be seen, but Kathy decided against the chance encounter with rattlesnakes as the sun set. The pamphlet has a stamp on it declaring “Watch out for Rattlesnakes!” We saw one fossil outside the visitors center, and a cottontail go under the car on her way to the brush.

On our way out, we looked for our first rattlesnake, and found him belly up. Obviously that jeep got him. Headed south on NE 29 as it got darker. Again we saw dark clouds spitting lightning, this time on both sides of us. Some pretty spectacular lightning shows!

We found a gas station to fill up in Mitchell, NE, then headed west on US 26. This time a dark bulky cloud with lightning displays was to the south of us and going our way. We used our imaginations to figure like what particular storm clouds looked.

When we entered Wyoming, we ran into another terrific stink. At Torrington, WY, we turned south on US 85, fearing we would head into that storm. Soon we were surrounded by storm clouds, but above us we could see stars! We hurried along, hitting the tail end of one storm, but missed getting hit by lightning! We saw spectacular streaks going in every direction, and some repeated in the same path over and over. Also saw sheet lightning.

We arrived in dry Cheyenne, WY and found a AAA motel, the Stage Coach Motel, for about $32. We checked in and fell into bed.
Next: Colorado.