Custer State Park

July 5

Before leaving Pierre, I wanted to see the state capitol.  This was not too time consuming because Pierre is so little, and there was no traffic, and the capitol was pretty quiet.  It was Sunday, but it's such a quiet town anyway.  The capitol is beautiful, we stopped, I snapped a few pictures and then were drove back toward the Black Hills.

Wall Drug is the master at advertising with billboards and
drawing you in.  We saw dozens of signs in both directions

Wondering what these are...
I think they were near Hayes

We were able to see the hour drive or so outside of Pierre since it was daytime and we weren't worried about gas.  Wow!  There were some areas that were just huge fields of wildflowers - pinks, yellows, purples, whites.  What a beautiful prairie!  We drove past Hayes, and there were several mounds of twisted metal.  I couldn't figure them out at all until Chris mentioned that they looked like the silos.  I don't know if that's what they are, but I wouldn't be surprised if maybe a tornado came through and the this damage.  I tried searching for it online, but to no avail.  There were silos all over the place though, especially as we headed toward Pierre and beyond.  This was definitely farming country.  The other item dotting the country side were the big round bales of hay.  Some of them were stacked up nicely on each other in big triangular shapes.  Others were just evenly dispersed across the fields.

We stopped by Wall Drug very quickly just to use the restroom, and then continued on to Custer State Park.  We wanted to go through the park before making it to the Crazy Horse Memorial.  We thought we'd do lunch in Custer.  The drive to the park was more prairie than I thought it would be, although we were moving more into hills, and eventually more trees began to appear.  The entrance price to the park bought us a full week, which is a bummer that we only have this day.  We asked the park ranger if there were some good easy trails to walk on, which she gave us a map and also told us of the wildlife loop.  I was pretty excited about the wildlife loop.

We saw a herd of elk almost immediately after turning onto the loop, but they were at quite a distance.  After a few pictures we continued not far before we ran into some pronghorns.  These were much closer and they were really cute.  We drove quite a ways after this through the the grassy slopes up to the peak of the loop.  It was beautiful looking over the grasses rippling in the wind carpeting the hills all around.  We dropped into a small tree grove and saw a bunch of cars pulled over - this is the telltale sign that some wildlife viewing is about to happen.  It was actually small herd of burros that now roamed the park.  They were pretty tame and several people were out of their cars feeding them carrots.  I don't know if this was allowed or not, I'm guessing not since it said not to feed the wildlife. We did just pass a wildlife informational station, so maybe there were told what to feed.  Chris got pretty close to one of the burros and it sniffed his hand hoping for food.  There were some pretty wildflowers growing along the creek in the area as well.  As we left the burros, we caught up to a burro who decided he would help cause a traffic jam.  I just thought it was too cute to not take a picture.

The loop scenery began to change into more of a forest with open meadows of grassland.  The hills became sharper and steeper, and at this point, I just really hoped we would get to see a buffalo.  We were there in the early afternoon and were told they were more active in morning and evening.  We hoped to come back to the loop later and see more wild animals.  Suddenly, we came upon more cars pulled over and I saw it...a lone buffalo in a meadow having his lunch.  It was really beautiful getting to see this massive and majestic animal.  He was pretty far out, so it was hard to make out too much detail, but I had the camera on him as he shook his head upward and to the side, then he decided to lay down and rest.  We finally left and it was a short drive to the end of the wildlife loop.

We continued on to Custer for lunch and stopped briefly by a lake to enjoy the view.  It felt more mountainous and no longer grassland hills, and the temperature was dropping.  Part of that may be the stormy clouds moving in.  We parked just off the small main street and walked along it looking at the different eating places.  There were only a few and we decided on Buglin' Bull and at first went up to the top patio, but a few rain drops started to fall and the view was blocked, so it wasn't worth it. We went downstairs, ordered our hamburgers.  Chris wanted to try buffalo, so I was surprised when he didn't order a buffalo burger.  My hamburger patty was huge and so I ripped off the excess part hanging out of the bun.  Chris asked if he could eat it so he could taste the buffalo separate from the burger...then I realized he thought all the burgers were buffalo, didn't realize you had to order it special.  I felt bad, although not too bad because the one buffalo burger I had years ago in Denver I didn't think tasted all that great.

We walked Main Street a bit looking in the gift shops.  There were buffalo statues with beautiful scenic paintings on them on each corner.  We walked across the street to "The Bank"  - a coffee shop in an old fancy building.  I ordered some hot coffee because I didn't want to be tired for the driving we had to do.  By the time we walked back to the car the skies looked pretty nasty and the rain drops were growing bigger and more frequent.

We hopped in the car just in time, and turned toward Crazy Horse.  We wanted to just drive by, hoping to see it from a distance and then take a scenic drive around Custer State Park.  By the time we arrived at Crazy Horse a few miles down the road, it was raining pretty steadily.  We decided not to pay to go in (we were still on the fence, especially now with the rain).  Instead we turned toward the scenic loop.  The rain became so heavy it was hard to see and that scared me not knowing the roads we would be driving on and how prone they were to flash flooding and rock slides.

We looked turned back toward the town and the rain quickly diminished to just a steady beat.  We drove back to the coffee shop, now closed, to try to access their wifi so we could check the radar and figure out our plans.  The lightning was striking right overhead, since we'd see the flash and hear the thunder almost immediately.  The radar showed we were just at the beginning of the storm and there was a much larger eye headed our way, and so we figured the scenic drive was out.  We could stay in town and wait out the storm then maybe do the wildlife loop again, but that would mean driving to Caspar Wyoming late at night to get to our hotel.

We didn't like that idea and I was a little nervous about being in the open prairie on the way to Casper with that size of a storm moving over that area.  I don't know much about tornados, but had seen on the weather channel that there was a 30% chance of the prairie storms turning into one (although I think that was closer to Pierre, not us).  I had asked the hotel clerk in Pierre if there was anything we should listen too, or any type of system to alert on tornados, but he was no help.  I'm guessing the natives know what to look for in a storm, I know nothing except what I've read about, no real practical experience.  We decided to head out, hoping to stay ahead of the eye of the storm.

It was a pretty drive, but I fell asleep quickly as Chris drove out the Black Hills.  I woke up after about an hour, and eventually we switched in the middle of the windy short grass prairie of Wyoming.    I watched the skies since we were surround with everything between dark grey clouds to white puffy clouds.  Some areas you could see it looked like the dark grey clouds had strings being pulled from them down to the earth and I knew that meant heavy rain.  There were other areas off in the distance at different directions where we could see rain.  We also saw areas where the sun was breaking through the lighter clouds creating rays bathing there earth in a golden glow.  It was quite magnificent in this big open land.

At one point we started passing signs stating that it was an area where there were explosions and to try to not have contact with orange clouds.  I thought this was odd.  Then we passed by a place that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere  but had massive equipment.  We saw pipelines and long long trains with coal piled on them.  We could barely see over the side of one area and saw a massive hole in the earth.  Yep, this was coal mining.  We went by the Black Thunder Coal Mine (which I later learned is the second largest producer in the US  - I now understand what we were really looking at and it was massive).

We stayed out of any severe storms, with just a few bouts of large hard drops.  Eventually the sky grew more dim and thick and we drove probably the last hour in what looked like a fog.  This made the prairie quite dreary.  I just wanted to get to our hotel.  The temperature had dropped to the low 60s.  I wanted pizza for dinner, so once we got to the hotel, after much discussion on whether to take our belongings in first and change into warmer clothes (that specifically was my desire) or just head straight to the Papa Johns' we found.  It would have been really easy at that point to let the discussion devolve into an argument because I think we were both tired and I was a bit cranky, but we resisted.   We decided to just head straight to Papa Johns through the quiet town.  We were the only ones in there and we split the pizza in two  - I like vegetarian, he likes meat.  We took it back to the hotel and relaxed there as the rainstorm grew stronger.