Black Hills & Badlands

We hit the road from Montana on Monday, heading for South Dakota. We passed right by Buffalo, WY and the Bighorn National Forest, where I spent a summer in high school. It would have been wonderful to stop, but we still had a long way to go. We did stop for lunch in Gillette, WY, where Marianne did a quick re-supply run to a local grocery store. She was the only customer in there wearing a mask, and thinks some people even laughed at her for wearing it. We had a similar experience at an ice-cream shop in South Dakota two days later (minus the snickering). When we're at tourist destinations we see a lot of mask-wearing, but not so much elsewhere, very different than what weexperience at home. It's interesting to see the different norms around masks in different regions.

Anyway, it was on to the Black Hills, a region of a lot of beauty and difficult history (we passed right by the Little Bighorn battlefield). These mountains, which are sacred to the Lakota Sioux, were given to them by treaty as a reservation... until gold was discovered there and countless miners took up illegal claims in the hills and begged for military protection. Today there's a lot of tourism playing on the "Western" tropes, and we stopped at what may be the prime example: Deadwood, South Dakota. Marianne: "So, people just come here to gamble and drink?" Me: "Yup. Same as it's been since the 1870s."

But, of course, the main Black Hills attraction overall is Mt. Rushmore. Tuesday morning we went to take a look, and got our presidential head fix. We also saw a family of mountain goats.

That was just a hint of what we'd see that afternoon and the next day at the Badlands, where we camped Tuesday night. We entered the park from the far west side and passed by pronghorn antelope, lots of prairie dogs, (female) bighorn sheep, and (more) bison. And our campsite was serenaded repeatedly by Western Meadowlarks.

The Badlands themselves are pretty incredible, and we had a blast over the day and a half scrambling over formations and enjoying the prairie setting.