Into the Black Hills

After arriving in quite a bit of snow as we climbed into the Mount Rushmore area, we were surprised that we awoke to only an inch or so of snow on Saturday morning. It was cold and mostly clear. It was looking like a promising day.

This was October 6, and we were celebrating our 45th anniversary! How is it possible? We can't possibly be old enough to have been married so long. But it's true. I had told Jerry that I really wanted to be somewhere I've never been before for this special anniversary, and here we were.

We had stayed at the K Bar S Lodge, which is outside Keystone in a lovely setting. We had a nice side view of George on Mount Rushmore (see yesterday's posting), it was quiet, and we had two entertaining flocks of wild turkeys to watch.

But we wanted to get out and see Mount Rushmore (also in the earlier posting) and the Black Hills before we had to head the car toward our day's ultimate destination--the Badlands National Park.

After visiting Mount Rushmore, we drove toward Custer State Park, which has an 18-mile wildlife loop road that sounded promising. To get to the park, we found ourselves climbing and climbing. It turned out we were on the Iron Mountain scenic drive, which had been mentioned in our guidebook. It was a beautiful drive. Loved all the rocky outcroppings, combined with pine forests and grasslands and views back to mountains (including Mount Rushmore).




It was an interesting, twisty road. Up we went, over "pigtail" wooden bridges and through a number of narrow, one-lane tunnels. And then down we came on the other side of the hills into a gentler landscape of rolling hills of grass.




We found our way to Custer State Park and took the wildlife loop road. What a pretty drive. Lovely vistas, and some pretty nice opportunities to see wildlife as well. We saw antelope, deer, buffalo, burros, prairie dogs, a crafty coyote, and a few bighorn sheep.















As we neared the end of the wildlife loop, it started to snow (again!). We headed east to catch our highway northeast to the Badlands. It kept getting colder (upper 20's) and snowing harder. We were starting to feel like snow magnets. We came down out of the beautiful Black Hills, and within 10 minutes we were driving through sun and 40 degrees. No indication that there was snow going on just a handful of miles to the west. Huh?

Who were we to complain? Jerry was especially glad to get out of the icy, snowy conditions. So we hoped that was the end of our snowy travels, and headed north. Off to the Badlands we go!


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