7/31/23

Tonight is the last day of my stay in Spearfish, SD.  I arrived last Thursday and checked in to the Elkhorn Ridge RV Resort around 2:00 after a longish (350 mile) drive from Salem.  This resort has everything.  Big Swimming Pool, hot breakfast in the morning, outdoor activity venue, poolside bar, etc., etc.  The list goes on and on.  There was a wedding held on the grounds on Saturday.  Easily the nicest campground I’ve experienced.  

I was met on the first evening by an old friend from college who works in Denver and whose bucket list included a visit to Mount Rushmore.  The schedule worked out and they, along with their son and his girlfriend, were able to get away for a few days to join me. 

On Friday we took a drive through Spearfish Canyon.  The highways here are typical of those that go through mountains in that they often follow winding paths to match the terrain.  It seems like US highway 85 in particular goes all over the place.  At one point, I think we were driving on highway 85, took a right on highway 85, then drove five or six miles to meet up with the same stretch of highway 85 that we were on in the first place.  So making a circle after Spearfish Canyon (on highway 85, of course) we drove through Lead, SD and then Deadwood SD a few miles further on.  Lead is the location of the Homestead Silver Mine, the strike that provided William Randolph Hearst’s father with the family wealth that WRH used to build a newspaper empire and his castle at San Simeon.    

We arrived at Deadwood hungry for a late lunch and just before the start of the big cowboy parade. It turns out that this weekend was the big annual Days of ‘76 celebration, which includes all types of festivities, including daily parades and rodeos. The celebration commemorates the founding of the town in 1876. We had lunch outdoors at a restaurant right along the parade route called Jacobs Brewhouse and Grocer. Very tasty chicken Caesar salad, and a couple of glasses of Riesling were a perfect complement to it.

Deadwood has been preserved so that the historic Main Street has much the same feel as it did during Deadwood’s days as a boom town in the late 1800s.  There are still lots of little hole in the wall bars and a surprising number of even smaller establishments that housed casinos.  The town is jumping until late at night.  We walked the old streets and checked out the shops.  It reminded me of an urban version of Tombstone, AZ, but larger.

The rodeo was a sellout of 4000 on both Friday and Saturday, impressive for a town with a population of 1,300.  We tried to go on Friday, but were too late as all tickets had been sold, so we bought some for Saturday.  It’s popular to say “This isn’t my first rodeo”, but in fact this WAS my first rodeo.  It was lots of fun and I realized early on that in spite of a temperature in the mid 80s, of the 4,000 in attendance, I was one of about a dozen not wearing blue jeans.  I did not blend.  It was a great family atmosphere although I didn’t see too many kids in attendance.

Sunday was a day spent hanging around and I bade my visitors a fond farewell after their much-appreciated visit. It can get a bit lonely on the road, and my friend and I had a chance to have some fun and catch up on some memories and long-overdue discussions.

A little more about the state of South Dakota itself.  The plains that make up the eastern 60% or so of the state are mostly farmland with gently rolling hills and few features other than the fields that stretch to the horizon in every direction.  Occasionally a clump of trees will intrude on the fields, and even without seeing it one can be sure that those trees surround a house and farm buildings.  There are large farms at home in Missouri, but the Dakota farms are of an entirely different scale.  Fields are enormous, and so are the machines that are used to plant, cultivate, and harvest their bounty.  

Once the traveler gets west of the town of Murdo, the landscape changes slightly, with scab lands and some low mesas appearing, remanants of long-ago volcanic activity.  The Black Hills can give the feeling of nearby mountains to those who don’t know better.  In fact, a journey of several hours west still remains before real mountains are found.  The Black Hills came up as a result of gradual bulging and buckling of the earth’s crust which over many eons caused the underlying rock to break the surface.  The hills themselves are made of granite which is among the oldest rock on the surface of the earth, ranging in age from 1.7 to 2.5 billion years in age. 

So on Tuesday I say farewell to South Dakota after a week inside her borders. It is a state of great, stark beauty with big spaces and plenty of solitude for any who might seek it.