Day Five - Black Hills Ride

Day 5 was the first day of the trip for Julie and Michele. We got a late start packing up the bikes and trying to find somewhere to eat breakfast in our sleepy little town of Hot Springs. Once on the road, today’s agenda included many sights, the first being Custer State Park.

We headed out of Hot Sprigs onto 385 North and entered Wind Cave National Park and saw our first buffalo right at the entrance. Not too soon after that we saw a whole herd of buffalo. For the rest of the trip through this park, we would see many herds. We came upon a field clearing and Michele noticed a bunch of prairie dogs. We stopped and were immediately “barked” at by the dogs, who apparently didn’t like having their pictures taken. Several of them posed for us. We continued through the park seeing different terrain, hills, fields, clusters of pine trees.

 As we entered Custer State Park, Tom was curious about large areas of trees with no vegetation on them and asked a park ranger. Pine beetles are the culprit. Nevertheless, the scenery was beautiful. In this park we saw “cantelope” as Julie called them, wild burros that were very tame and walked right up to car windows for handouts. We even saw a fuzzy foal burro. The roads were twisty with interesting roads that looped back underneath themselves. During the day we saw more and more fellow bikers.

We left Custer Park and headed north on 16 and headed up Iron Mountain. These roads were a real treat, with extremely tight and twisty turns and glimpses of Mt. Rushmore.

After meandering our way up and down Iron Mountain, we proceeded to Keystone where we stopped for lunch. After lunch, we headed through Deadwood and on into Sturgis. The number of bikes steadily increased as we approached Sturgis, in fact, we outnumbered cars by a significant margin.

We made our way into Sturgis, found ourselves a shady parking spot, and headed down to Main Street to visit the vendors. We walked around for a few hours, bought some t-shirts, marveled at all walks of life and outfits (lack of in some cases) and then headed back to the bike.

At this point, we still had 160 miles left on the itinerary for the day! We headed northwest into Spearfish. At Spearfish we headed south along the Spearfish Canyon. This road follows a creek that runs in between spires of cliffs and trees on either side.

We went south on 85, and were surprised by a “Welcome to Wyoming” sign, forgetting that we would enter another state today! Shortly after, we came over a hill and were greeted by an awesome view, as far as we could see into the distance, just plains and hills. We were all amazed.

We headed to Newcastle, WY and had dinner at the Old Mill Inn restaurant, which had plenty of history in the early 1900s. After dinner, there was still some daylight left, although fading, and we picked up route 16A back into South Dakota. Our route back to Hot Springs included a nighttime visit through Custer National Park, were Michele got the answer to her earlier question on where do the buffalo sleep? In the field or under trees? They sleep right in the fields where they graze.

We headed back to Hot Springs and arrived close to 10pm. Today's mileage was about 280 miles. Hopefully tomorrow we won’t have any nighttime rides!