Day 8 – Close Encounters of the Buffalo Kind

Custer State Park & Mount Rushmore, SD

We’re staying here in Custer State Park for three days, so it was very nice not to have to pack up this morning.  (Of course, alert readers of yesterday’s entry will recall that in fact we were not in the right campsite.  Luckily, no one arrived late last night to kick us out of our tent, but this afternoon some very nice people arrived with a reservation in hand.  A few phone calls later and we’d figured out where we were supposed to be – the very nice people offered to just switch with us for the night, but we found out we’d have to move for another reservation the following night.  Fortunately this just involved emptying the tent and moving it across the campground.)

Although only a state park, in both scope and scale Custer is really national park-league.  After a healthy camp breakfast (bacon!  And white bread fried in bacon grease!), we set off for a gold-panning activity in a creek near the visitor center.  My kids are always on board for any activity that involves getting wet and/or muddy, and a chance to indulge their acquisitive sides really puts the icing on the cake.  We did not find any gold, but the girls did find several near-microscopic garnets.  Or at least the ranger said they were garnets.

The kids also attended a few other ranger-led events, one of which involved making a faux bag of animal poop using candy.  (They have quite an imagination here.)  Lucky they did, though, because the candy poop bags were able to sustain the girls on our three-mile hike to Lovers’ Leap, a breathtaking cliff high on a ridge.  (We heard some hikers at the visitor center the next day saying they’d run into a large male buffalo at the top of the trail.  We did not have this experience but certainly saw plenty of (non-candy) evidence of their presence.)

 

We drove back to our campsite via the Wildlife Loop, which certainly lived up to its name.  Lanie fell asleep two minutes in and could not be roused, even when a herd of buffalo was literally milling around our car.  Or when a rouge burro came up and stuck his head right in my window, leading to distinct uneasiness on my part and much merriment in the back seat (and driver’s seat too, for that matter).  The buffalo actually stopped traffic for several minutes due to a calf who decided to nurse in the middle of the road.

This group is meant to look presidential

In the evening we set out for Mt. Rushmore along a "scenic route".  The route was in fact very scenic, but also rather terrifying -- climbing and descending mountain passes through many hairpin turns on an extremely narrow road.  (We both agreed that there was no way we were going back on the same road after dark, even if we had to drive 100 miles out of the way.)  The coolest feature of the road was two cleverly designed tunnels blasted through the rock (though they were also unnerving in their own way, since they were one-lane and blind, and you had to rely on honking your horn before starting through to avoid a head-on collision).  The tunnels themselves through the mountains were pretty neat, but they'd also been designed so that Mt Rushmore came into sight from a distance, with the four heads visible through the end of the tunnel.

Mt. Rushmore was the most crowded place we've been so far (which is not a big surprise, since it was Saturday night).  There’s a trail leading around the base of the monument, which lets you get away from the crowds a bit and some good views closer to the monument.  (We also had the inevitable Junior Ranger homework to complete as well.)  We stayed for the 9pm lighting ceremony, and by the time we’d gotten the Junior Ranger badges and gotten out of the clogged parking lot, it was quite late.  We managed to get home on a road that was slightly less “scenic” than the one we’d come in on, and happily all the kids slept all the way back to the campground.

Can you spy us in this picture?  At the Lovers' Leap.

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From Bob:

Day 8 Our wildlife adventures

To say we stuck around the state park today really sets this off on the wrong foot; we really did a lot.  Just driving from place to place here is adventurous, with lots of ups and downs and twists and turns. Plus you never know what kind of wildlife will be waiting around the next corner. 

Animals are all over the place here.  We saw dozens of deer along the road as we drove in last night. Turkeys and their little baby turks flourish right here in our campground.  There is evidence of buffalo, if you catch my drift, right in the lawn in front of the visitors center. 

But the real way to find animals is to drive around and wait to see a car pulled over.  That’s a fine sign that there’s an animal within viewing distance.  It can be a pronghorn antelope, or a mule deer, prairie dog, or elk.  We’ve seen them all.

Even Buffalo have made an appearance.  This encounter came with the most cars stopped along the road.  Everyone was stopped because the buffalo were in the road.  I couldn’t see what was blocking our path, but a nursing mother and calf were casually occupying the oncoming lane.  Not much farther along the road we were held up by a roving band of semi-wild burros.  Luckily, the girls went to a ranger program last night and learned that the burros tended to stick their heads inside cars in hopes of being fed.  They’re the only animals that guests are allowed to feed, according to the ranger, but you have to feed them vegetables.  When burros eat Doritos their lips turn orange and they lie down in the middle of the road with stomach aches.  This is what our junior naturalists in training have reported to us.

Laundry day!