August 8-11, 2007

OK, here are the details of our trip from August 8 through and including August 11. I know it's long. If you don't have the time to read it, feel free to use the delete key! Photos will follow. Mark is doing the captions on the photos now instead of me so they should be a lot funnier!


Wednesday, August 8 – We drove into Sturgis, SD, for the Harley Davidson Motorcycle Rally. We saw bikes EVERYWHERE in the area, not just in Sturgis! It reminds me of Sixth Street in Austin! Lots of characters. LOTS of motorcycles. There are shops selling everything a motorcyclist needs: leathers, beer, patches, tattoos, beer, parts, beer, t-shirts, beer, tattoos, beer, hats, beer, saddle bags, LED lights for the cycles, beer, sheepskin covers for the seats, motorhomes and trailers to haul cycles, … I really had a good time in the tattoo parlors because they had SO many artists working on people at one time and they let you just wander around and look at what they were doing. They were REALLY busy. I took some pictures of one guy getting his tattoo and he later came up to talk to us in another tattoo parlor so we asked some questions. The fine lines in the tattoo are done with the small electric tool that only has 1 needle. When they do the shading and filling in they use a head with 4 or 5 needles to spread the ink out. The ink goes down through at least 2 layers of skin in order to have the color stay there and not fade away as the skin replaces itself. The guy whose photo we took was in the chair for 3 hours because he was having an old tattoo redone to be incorporated into a new tattoo that was more original. His old tattoo was too common and he didn’t like it anymore. He said that the skin doesn’t bleed while they are doing the tattoo, but that afterwards it “oozes” so they have to cover it with gauze for a few days. I’ll let the pictures tell the story. You just can’t believe how many motorcycles there are.

Wednesday night we went to the Crazy Horse Memorial Light Show. Crazy Horse was a Lakota Sioux Indian war chief who led his first war party before he was twenty. He fought fierce battles to save the Indian’s lands, including helping to defeat Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He finally surrendered to the army, but in 1877 he left the reservation without permission to take his sick wife to her parents. The army arrested him and he went peacefully until he saw that they were taking him to the guardhouse. He began to struggle and one of the arresting officers bayoneted him in the back. Before he died, a white man asked him “So, where are your lands now?” He pointed to where his people used to live and said, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” In 1947, the Lakota chief invited Korczak Ziolkowski (a sculptor who had won first prize at the New York World’s Fair in 1939) to build a monument because “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes also.” Korczak age 40, worked with Gutzom Borglum on Mount Rushmore for a couple of weeks but couldn’t get along with him and quit. (Lots of other people couldn’t get along with Borglum and quit also…) He found a mountain and designed a statue of Crazy Horse riding his horse and pointing with his arm out straight toward his lands. Korczak married Ruth then and had ten children. (Seven of the children still work with Ruth on the project.) He, like Borglum, always had trouble finding enough money to continue the work. Twice he turned down $10 million in federal funding in order to keep the project private. The Lakota Indians have a very ambitious plan for the entire area with museums, a university and a medical training center. So far, the face has been carved and lots of the mountain has been blasted away for his pointing arm. If you look at the photos, the open section under where his arm will be is 10 stories high. The laser and light show was interesting but not all that great.

Thursday, we (and a lot of motorcycles) went to Hill City to see the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. This is a group of scholars who didn’t want to work for universities but wanted to dig and assemble their own way. As a group they found the dinosaurs Sue and Stan and a bunch of others. Sue is the most complete dinosaur ever found—and the US government actually stole it from BHIGR! What a story. I won’t go into it here, but if you are interested here is the website http://www.wmnh.com/wmssz000.htm or http://www.bhigr.com/pages/info/info_sue.htm (on this one be sure to go through the 6 sections under Sue T. rex Story to the upper right on the screen. Sue is now in the Field Museum in Chicago. These people find the fossils and then make the reproductions that appear in most of the museums around the world. Their “museum” was quite a collection of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, but the best was their collection of stones and quartz formations!

After we left the BHIGR we drove the windy roads through the beautiful scenery of the Black Hills through Custer State Park. The Black Hills were formed when molten rock pushed up through the limestone and sandstone of what used to be part of the inland sea. The limestone and sandstone have weathered away and the black rock is exposed in lots of places. It really is a very pretty ride. As soon as you get past the small geographic area of the Black Hills, the countryside opens up again into rolling grasslands.

Friday, August 10 – This morning we drove down to Hot Springs, SD, to the Mammoth Site. WOW! As I mentioned, this area used to be all limestone and sandstone from the inland sea. Water would seep through the ground and form caves. This was especially true in this area because there were hot springs and the hot water dissolved the stone even more quickly. Eventually, about 26,000 years ago, the underlying rock had been dissolved so much that it couldn’t support the ground above and the ground fell into the cavern creating a sink hole about 65’ deep and 120’ by 150’. The sink hole filled up with water from the springs and the Columbian Mammoth and the Woolly Mammoth and other animals came to the sink hole looking for water and vegetation for about 350 to 700 years. But, the steep sides of the sink hole were lined with slippery shale and the animals couldn’t get out of the sink hole after they had finished drinking. So they died and lay on the bottom of the sink hole. The bones were covered with layers of silt, sediment and mud until the “mud plug” was level with the surrounding ground. After that, the soft limestone and sandstone eroded away while the harder “mud plug” remained. In 1974 a bulldozer was excavating this high ground to level it for a housing development when a mammoth bone was exposed. Scientists came to investigate the site and determined that it was a major fossil find. The developer worked on other areas of the project while the scientists did their thing. When the incredible extent of the find was known, the developer sold that area to a non-profit group for exactly what he had paid for it as long as they kept everything they found in the area as well as a few more “strings” to help the area. At first the excavation work was only done in the summer and the bones were all covered with dirt for the winter to protect them. Finally, in 1986 a building was constructed over the entire site so that it would be protected from the elements and working the site would be easier. They knew the boundaries of the sink hole because the red limestone around the sinkhole showed the undisturbed ground. As long as the building was built on the red dirt, the entire sink hole was inside. They have built a perfect set-up for visitors to view the area and see the excavations. They keep adding to the building and the amenities to make it better. Grandma Etta was here in 1987 or so and she didn’t see a lot of the things we saw today. As you can see in the photos, most of the excavation is being done around the edges of the sink hole. That is because that’s where the bones are—the animals died as they were trying to get out of the sink hole. A very interesting fact is that the bones are NOT fossils. They have not been fossilized but are still just bone. They are very fragile. Our guide didn’t know WHY they weren’t fossilized, but thinks it is because the mud didn’t seep into the bones and just covered them up.

All in all, we just can’t believe all of the terrific things there are to see and do in this area. If anyone is looking for a place to spend a week, this is it. Within 50 miles in any direction you can find an interesting place to spend a day or a half-day.

We are now in Belle Fourche, about 50 miles northwest of Rapid City, SD.

Saturday, August 11 - Deadwood is an old gold mining town that has been rebuilt and/or preserved as an old western town…except for the plethora of gambling halls! Well, I don’t know, maybe that IS authentic. There were no brothels though. The last one closed in 1980 (really!). It was a fun place to spend a half-day or so. If you like to gamble, you could probably spend a week. Deadwood was the location of an HBO TV series for the past three years. I was told that they ran out of money to do year four. I know my brother knows all about the town because of the series!

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.9gxn0wmn&x=0&y=-7ibtcy

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.6jghtsq7&x=0&y=8s6wpp

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.6ceakhv3&x=0&y=x8im8g