Deadwood, SD & Badlands, SD

We drove over to Deadwood, South Dakota after hearing about it being a small historic town with re-enactments of several famous events.

Originally Deadwood, SD was a lawless town next to one of the richest gold mining areas in the Black Hills. It's sole purpose in life was to separate the newly found gold from the miners as quickly and easily as possible.

Lots of saloons, gambling halls, and gentleman's establishments filled with ladies of the evening, sometimes referred to as 'tainted doves'. Reportedly the ratio of men to women was 50 men for every 1 women. If these methods of taking money/gold from the miners didn't work there was always the more crass methods of thuggery & thievery.

As usual, the people who got rich from all of the Black Hills Gold were the people providing goods and services to the miners, not the miners themselves. The two brothers who found one of the initial deposits and literally started the gold rush, staked a claim and removed several thousand dollars of gold from their mine. Eventually they sold their claim to one William Randolph Hearst. Little did the two brothers know that mine would go on for another 150 years, producing 10% of all the gold found in the black Hills. Ouch!

Anyway, after a beautiful drive to Deadwood, about an hour North of here, we arrived to find the place mobbed with people. Loud, noisy, impatient people, all looking for basically non-existent parking. There was a free concert being held and all the re-enactments had all been cancelled (actually they said postponed) until early next week. Wanting neither the crowds or the hassles of fighting all those people, we skedaddled.

We drove through Sturgis, SD, which is empty now that the biker rally is over for this year. Actually is has a permanent population of ~6,000 people however after hosting 300,000+ bikers, 6,000 qualifies as empty....

We drove through Rapid City rapidly (sorry about the pun but it was quick) and proceeded to the Badlands National Park. I wanted to arrive in late afternoon to get the best light for pictures and avoid some of the heat.

The landscape truly looks other-worldly. Some say it looks like the surface of the moon... having not been to the moon I couldn't say but is does look unlike anything else I've seen on earth. Mile after mile of highly eroded earth.

There are lots of warning about watching out for rattlesnakes which apparently think the Badlands are the perfect place to call home. To avoid the heat of the sun they hide in rock crevices and in the tall grass. As everything in the park is either a rock crevice or tall grass, you don't see too many people wandering off the designated trail.

I know MLA and I not only stayed on the trail, we stayed rigidly in the middle of the trail and kept at least one eye on the path at our feet. They say you'll hear the rattle before a rattlesnake strikes however it would be my luck to encounter one whose rattle was on the blink for some reason.

In any case, we neither tripped over or saw any rattlesnakes and we did see the Badlands in all their spectacular glory.

See Ya!