The Road to Sturgis - Part 3

It's Monday and we're checked into our hotel room in Deadwood, South Dakota. Tomorrow morning I'll be driving up to Sturgis for John Farnam's Urban Rifle Class, but today we had our last day of sightseeing.

We spent the night before in Hulett, Wyoming, in a cozy little A-frame at the Hulett Motel after spending the day at Devil's Tower. 

 
Seeing Devil's Tower in person is an experience I find difficult to describe. My rational thoughts tell me that it's a unique formation of igneous rock formed by millions of years of erosion, but seeing it simply stunned me into silence. I'll the photos speak for themselves:

As you hike around the tower, you experience seeing it from different angles, the sun casts different shadows, the wind blowing through the forest, the wildlife – it creates a truly extraordinary experience.

After leaving the tower, we spent the night in Hulett, more a ranching town than tourist town. It does have two local museums that are worth checking out. The Hulett Museum and Art Gallery has a nice collection of Devil's Tower memorabilia, dinosaur bones, and of course – some guns!

The other place, called “Rogue's Gallery” was billed more as an antique shop, but had an incredible display of artifacts from the Indian Wars and settlement of the Great Plains. Among these artifacts were a large collection of Indian guns, some of which may have seen action at Little Big Horn.

FBI evidence seized after the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation.

This revolver was used in a notorious local murder.

Guns captured by Indians and used in the Indian Wars.

In the morning, we headed out for Deadwood, with a short stop in Aladdin, Wyoming. The Aladdin General Store has been in business for over 100 years.

Just outside of Aladdin, we stopped to see an old tipple from the Aladdin coal mine. The tipple is an inclined series of chutes for sorting coal.

After checking out the tipple we stopped for breakfast in Belle Fourche, South Dakota where there is a monument to the geographical center of the United States.

We also checked out the Tri-State Museum, which featured the mount of a local infamous wolf, “Three Toes” who killed thousands of dollars worth of livestock and terrorized the locals for over thirteen years.

And of course, no museum would be complete without memorials to its local veterans, including a pilot from the Doolittle Raid. 

I have to admit, seeing the same type of uniform you wore in the service in a museum makes you feel kind of old:

Our drive to Deadwood took us through the beautiful Spearfish Canyon. While it may have taken a little longer, it was worth it for the breathtaking scenery:

Bridal Veil Falls

Once in Deadwood, we did some local sightseeing, including the Bullock Hotel, the site of the No. 10 Saloon (where Wild Bill Hickok was killed). 

Deadwood's historic Main Street.

 

We also headed up to the town of Lead (pronounced LEED) to see the Homestake Gold Mine. The mine's now closed, but it's home to a particle physics laboratory, where experiments are being conducted to study theoretical particles over 4000 feet underground (you can't do this sort of thing on the surface because of cosmic radiation interference). 

The original mining pit is over 1000 feet deep - deep enough to swallow Devil's Tower!  The actual mine itself goes over 8000 feet deep. 

Tomorrow, I start the class, which is the whole reason for this trip. But getting here has been half the fun!

Road to Sturgis: Part 2

Our second day on the road consisted of driving from Mitchell to Keystone, South Dakota. Our roadside goals for this trip were to see the Badlands and Mount Rushmore, but we got lucky with a couple other finds.

As you head down I90, the opportunity will come to exit onto the Badlands Scenic Byway. If you have the time, it's definitely worth the detour. It's difficult to do the Badlands justice with photos, but here are some attempts:

 

We took quite a few more pictures, and you can see them on the Flickr account.

Once we finished the Badlands, we headed on towards Keystone, where Mount Rushmore is located. On the way, we saw this unusual site by the roadside:

That's a “Goat Bridge” designed to lure tourists into the Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo. The goats seemed to enjoy hanging out on the bridge.

We finally arrived at Mount Rushmore and discovered the sun was in almost exactly the wrong place for photos, but we gave it our best shot.

Outside the Mount Rushmore gift shop, we found this interesting historical tidbit. Thomas Jefferson was not only an author of the Declaration of Independence, but he also was recorded as creating one of the first known ice cream recipes!

Keystone is a neat little town nestled in the Black Hills. Here's the view from our hotel parking lot:

Just up the road was an interesting abandoned mine – it appeared that work was still going on in an adjacent plant.

On our way out of town the next morning, we stopped in Rapid City to pick up some supplies and took a quick detour to the town's Dinosaur Park. These dinosaurs were built in the 1930s by the WPA on the highest point in the city.

In the parking lot, we found a historical marker commemorating the “Hangman's Hill” just up the road, where two outlaws were hung in the 1800s. On the way back, we discovered that this ghastly place was actually in someone's front yard:

Plus side: great view of the city.

Tomorrow: Devil's Tower, Hulett Museum guns, and Indian guns!