Black Hills South Dakota

Custer State Park

Beautiful! That's the only word I can think of to describe the mountains here.

Custer State Park

Our first destination of the day was to Custer State Park. This state park is definitely one of the most beautiful state parks that I've been in. The park has a herd of about 1300 buffalo, tons of wildlife, hundreds of miles of hiking/mountain biking trails in addition to many scenic roads throughout. We opted for the wildlife loop road first. It was awesome, we saw many buffalo in the fields and right along the road. They were huge, but Scott tells me that I haven't seen anything yet and that the ones in Yellowstone are as big as mini vans. We also saw many pronghorns, prairie dogs, white tail deer, and burros.

Custer State Park

Custer State Park

As sad as it is, the highlight of the day for me were the burros! The burros were not shy and would walk right up to your vehicle and if you get out of your vehicle they walk right up to you and some even follow you. They were hysterical and very friendly. Also, we could actually pet them and interact with them, so how could that not be my favorite part of the day? :-)

Custer State Park

Soon after we stopped with the burros the rain came again. There was rain, thunder, lightning, and hail. Nothing like a good mountain storm. We felt bad for all of the bikers because it was pouring and there was not shelter in the park. We saw many bikers pulled off the road huddled under trees. I was thankful that we got the comfort of the truck. During the storm the temperature was in the 50's, brrrrr, but when the storm finally cleared we were back in the 70's again.

Wind Cave National Park

Our next stop was Wind Cave National Park. We took about an hour long tour of the cave, it was cool! You won't see any stalactites or stalamites in these caves. The cave we toured is the 5th largest in the world and they estimate that only about 5% of the cave has actually been discovered.

Custer State Park

The scenery we have seen today is just breathtaking! Pictures do not even come close to doing it justice. It's very green here, and we overheard one of the tour guides mention that it's been a wetter summer than usual and that the grasslands/prairies are typically all brown by now. I feel fortunate that we get to see everything green!

Sunday Gorge Hike

Sunday Gorge Hike

So of course Scott and I have to do at least one hike while we're here. We decided to head back into Custer State Park. We opted for a hike called the Sunday Gorge. This hike definitely met all of our expectations and more. It might have been one of the most scenic trails we have ever hiked. We went from huge boulders to pine forests and then some grasslands. On our way down the gorge it was so steep and slippery that we had to use handrails. It was amazing.




On our way back to camp we decided to take Needles Highway. WOW, it was awesome. We drove the truck through a tunnel that was only about 8 feet wide, I was glad that Scott was driving. We also spotted a few Bambi's on the way back to camp, it was great!

We enjoyed another camp fire last night, it was a perfect way to end such an awesome day!

It took me over two hours to upload the last posting to this blog due to the slow internet connection. I have a slow one again so I'm not going to upload pictures. As soon as we get to a spot with a better connection I will upload pics for you all to see.