Sunday, 7/20/97

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            Thank goodness, no hail last night, no storm damage to our equipment either.  We packed up camp and headed out of Custer State Park via Rapid City toward the Badlands.  In Rapid City, we visited the delightful tourist attraction, Bear Country, which is a drive through zoo where the animals and your car share the same enclosures; keep your windows closed, please. 

             The most interesting section was the wolf enclave, where we paused to observe classic dominant wolf - subservient wolf behavior.  There were several wolves sunning themselves together, when another wolf approached from a wooded area with his head lowered and his tail out straight behind him.  Immediately, all the sunning wolves took notice, and one got up and slinked away with its tail down between it’s legs.  The new wolf took the very spot where the departing wolf had been to lay down and sun himself.

            Bear Country also has a gift shop; big surprise.  But Brennan and I are not big on shopping for tourist trinkets, and we were nearing the end of our three week journey and still had not picked up souvenirs for family and friends.  It turned out that they had a wonderful selection of T-shirts, so guess what friends and family got.

            We made another tourist stop for a walk through the Black Hills Maze.  It has over 30,000 square feet of twisty, turny passages all alike defined by eight foot high wooden walls. Some times you would encounter a flight of stairs leading up to a catwalk bridging over the walls to some other section of the maze, giving it a 3-D flavor.  The objective of the maze is to try to find your way to each of four towers that had an ink pad and a hand stamp of one of the Mt. Rushmore presidents.  Visiting all four checkpoints allowed you to stamp the faces of all four presidents on your card over a partial drawing of the great sculpture.  The head stamps were so worn down from use, that you could not tell which president’s image was smeared on your card, but each had a different appearing smear.  There was a sign at each location telling you which position on the card to stamp: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th.  Of course, that meant you could visit the four stations in any order that you happened to find.

            Brennan and I each went our own separate ways into the maze, effectively competing with each other.  It was a lot of fun as one or the other of us would be up on a catwalk and the other on the ground somewhere and we would temporarily be able to see each other and wonder who was making better progress.  The most amazing part was that we finished in a dead heat tie at 27 minutes in the maze.

            Our next stop was that marvelous intrusion into the wilds of South Dakota, Wall Drug, the most advertised tourist gift shop on the planet Earth.  We walked through the place, not to purchase anything, but to get lunch and say we had been there.  Fortunately, they had a stationary section and I was able to purchase a new steno pad for this journal.  I had only a few pages left in my second one of the trip.  In fact this day's entry was recorded in the new pad.  Before we left, I claimed my free donut, promised by some of the highway billboards to any Vietnam Era Veterans.  We proceeded on to the Cedar Pass Campground in Badlands National Park, selected from a large choice of unoccupied campsites and set up the trailer. 

            We then accomplished one of the most important objectives of the trip.  After getting camp prepared, we drove the Scenic Drive to the trail head for Saddle Pass Trail.  We hiked to the east around a ridge and up an arroyo to that place were, in 1985, Brennan, at five years old, was not allowed to climb up with his siblings and Dad because he was too small.  The place we called the “Dragon’s Lair”.  It was not marked on the maps from the Park Service nor on the Trails Illustrated Map of the park.  There were no signs along the road or at the parking area that even hinted that it existed.   We had made up the name.

            Not many people visit it.  But if you looked carefully as you drove by, you could see a trace of a dark cave in the eroded terrain about fifty feet up a small canyon.  There was a worn path up a ridge and into the crevice to where, set back into the wall was a deep eight foot diameter hole, straight down into darkness, too deep to see the bottom.  The pit is not climbable without aids, too far to jump into, and just eerie enough to suggest that at some time in the past it was indeed used as a nesting place for some huge flying fire breather. The expression of accomplishment and pride on Brennan’s face as he squatted at the brink of this long ago memory that had now been conquered was caught by my camera.  It was not a particularly difficult place to get to for a healthy seventeen year old athlete like him, but it was the five year old’s disappointment that had been answered, twelve years later.

            On the way back down the slope, we encountered a man who was poking around in the draws leading up to the cave.  He was discovering lots of bones of deer and perhaps other large critters.  There were many vertebrae, a jaw, and more legs than any single deer ought to have.  He even found a rib that looked large enough to belong to a bison.  Since Badlands National Park is one of the world’s most prolific Pleistocene Era fossil deposits, there was good likely hood of finding fossilized bones of ancient animals as well as the more recent meals for a coyote.  By the way, just so the Park Rangers don’t get upset, the man we met was not collecting the fossils; he was just examining them and leaving them where he found them.  I have read somewhere that dragons did not have bones, which explains the lack of dragon fossils.

            Brennan and I then walked back around to the parking lot and started up the Saddle Pass Trail.  At the parking lot there is flat prairie extending as far as you can see to the south.   The trial leads due north and climbs up what looks like a small mountain, 216 feet up, in about a third of a mile.  But when you get to the top, the mountain does not drop off on the other side.  Huh!  Yea, it is a flat prairie at that altitude extending to the north as far as you can see, except for a few cute small buttes breaking up the pool table appearance.  You have just climbed up a mountain and there is no other side of the mountain.   Those cute little buttes turned out to be twenty or thirty feet tall when we spotted some hikers passing by the base of one of them.  (Or perhaps they were very tiny hikers). 

            The top of the trail is not the top of the terrain, with several peaks on both sides looking like mountains in their own right.  We scrambled around the peaks up top for a while, then started back down on different routes, Brennan exploring for a new route, Bob sticking pretty much to the established path.  We lost sight of each other, but an audible signaling system to stay aware of approximately where each other were.  Bob spotted something in a boulder a few hundred feet off the trail, a quarter of the way down the slope, and wandered over to examine it.  It was a fossilized bone fragment embedded in the solid rock. A real prehistoric creature that had died a zillion years ago, got covered with sand, which turned into sandstone, then after eons, recently fell away from the eroding cliff.  The exposed portion looked like the end of a limb designed to carry a lot of weight, about four or five inches across and rounded off like the top of a leg bone.  I also found what looked like a rib embedded in a different solid rock. 

            Meanwhile, Brennan had worked his way down to the ledge above the Dragon’s Lair and then down to the lower level prairie.  On the way he found a huge bone fragment that he believed to be from a current era bison.

            I rejoined Brennan at the bottom and we started back to the car.  He was telling me about how wonderful his “Kick Butt” shoes were for scrambling around on this crumbling terrain, giving good gripping footholds on any surface of the shoe that was able to make contact.  By the way, there were two inches of rain here the night before, so the Badlands were the wettest they had been in years.  Just as Brennan was finishing his sentence, I noticed he was walking into a patch of slimy mud.  I said, “You are about to be up to your butt in mud in those shoes.”  Which, I suppose, was not as helpful as if I had said, “Watch out for that mud.”  

            He did not fall down, which was fortunate, but the mud caked itself onto his shoes so much that he could feel the extra weight as he walked.  Back at the car, we tried pouring water from a canteen over the shoes to flood the mud off the shoes.  That did not help.  Then he tried banging the two shoes together in his hands.  That even though we could see bits of mud flying in all directions with each collision, there seemed to be just as much mud caked to the shoes.  

            We returned to camp at 6:30 pm. fixed soup and sandwiches and apple slices for dinner.  Then we drove to the store to get ice, and call home.  The ice machine said put in $1.50 in quarters for a bag of ice.  I started pumping quarters into the only active slot I could find on the machine.  After the fifth quarter, presto, a bag of ice rumbled and fell into the exit bin.  Sometimes you win the lottery.

            The call home from the only pay phone at the store, closed by now, got us the answering machine at home, so I left a short message.  Then we went up to the Visitor Center to join the ranger lead night hike.  The hike was scheduled to begin at 9:45 pm, but we were an hour early, so we climbed up a nearby butte and perched on a narrow ridge that dropped off on both sides just far enough to make us notice the height.  Brennan read a book by flashlight while Bob just enjoyed the trailing edges of the sunset.

            After about half an hour, we climbed down off the butte to join the small crowd of participants who had began to assemble a half hour early in the Visitor Center parking lot.  Brennan got out the camping guitar and strummed for a while sitting on the curb, then Bob took a turn for a while.  No one complained, but we did not get any applause, either.

            We put the guitar away just as the Ranger called for everyone’s attention at 9:45 pm.  He said he would lead us all across the road and away from the lights of the parking lot along a mostly dry stream bed, but we were to watch out for the few wet muddy spots.  It was an interesting experience to watch dozens of people in all kinds of footgear, many without flashlights of their own, try to negotiate across rugged terrain with no real trail.  Just stay close and walk where the person in front of you goes.  He lead us single file about a quarter mile away from the parking lot to a flat area just behind a butte with steep sloping sides. 

            He suggested that we might want to sit at the side of the butte facing out toward him, but many chose to clamber up the sides of the butte to anywhere they could cling without falling down or kicking debris on those below them.  Among the climbers were Bob, about ten feet up, and Brennan, another ten feet up. 

            The ranger then gave his presentation for about a half an hour. He talked about stars and night vision adaptation and night sounds.  He used a nifty sound locator to capture and amplify for all of us to hear, the echo chirps of a bat in flight hunting bugs.  Then he talked about how the Indians used to have games that helped them improve their senses.  He got two volunteers to stand up and be “Big Rattle Snake” and “Little Rattle Snake” with a few pebbles in a tin can for each one, and then blindfolded them both.  When Big Rattle Snake shook his can, Little Rattle Snake had to shake his can.  Big Rattle Snake tried to find and tag Little Rattle Snake, while Little Snake tried to evade.  Yea!  He admitted that it sounds a lot like the familiar rules for “Marco Polo” played at every swimming hole, pool and beach.

            The ranger program ended at 10:30 pm and after wending our way back to the Visitor Center, and back to camp I sat down and made the journal entries for today.  Wow, what a day.  Nighty Night at midnight.

            So, as we are getting back from the night hike, I said to Brennan, “Since they got two of their annual sixteen inches of rain here last night, and the sky has only a few scattered clouds, we don’t need to find and move the raincoats out of the car into the trailer."

              You guessed it.  Sometime during the night, around 2 am,  the wind picked up and it began to rain hard.  We had to quick go around closing all the zippered windows in the trailer.