Gray Line Black Hills Tour

A view of Washington and a bit of Lincoln through a gap inside a little cave. more pics

Yup, it's really one of those big Gray Line busses. I was picked up right in front of my hotel. The driver's name is Randy and the couple who were picked up before me are actually from Vancouver, WA. We picked up ten more people, including a father and son, who were masochistically travelling cross-country on Greyhound, and a couple from Australia. If it weren't for the son, I would have been the youngest in the crowd.

Our stops:

• Borglum Historical Center in Keystone, SD. Borglum is the guy who carved the faces on Mount Rushmore.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial. I followed the trail down to get closer to the mountain, and there was this little cave, which was actually a gap between a cluster of huge rocks. I wondered why they made the trail detour to this cave, then I looked up through a gap and saw the view in the picture above.
• Lunch. The day started out bright and sunny with a little wind. Before lunch, it started drizzling. After lunch (one hour later), freezing rain was pelting down and the winds were blowing hard.
• Crazy Horse Memorial. I got me a piece of rock blasted from the mountain.
• Custer State Park. We saw a few buffalo in the distance, some antelope(?), horses, and burros.
• Needles Highway. First, I thought it was named "Needles" for the pine trees. Then we went through the tunnels -- Talk about going through the eye of a needle!
• Iron Mountain Road. There were two full-circle turns. Imagine going south, then going around in a circle and under the bridge where you were to head east. That's what those full-circle turns were.

What I learned from Randy, the tour guide / bus driver:

• Ponderosa pines are red on one side and black on the other. And you can use them to guide you if you get lost in the woods where they grow. The red side always faces south, because the sun is mostly in the south side in the northern hemisphere, and the black mossy side always faces north. A mnemonic is to think of people living in Florida as being more sunburnt (red) than people in, oh, say, Minnesota. Mind you, I'm not saying that people in Minnesota are mossy....
• One of the other passengers asked what the difference was between a buffalo and a bison. Randy posed the question to the rest of us. Is it the size, the color, the humps? Well, when nobody responded, his reply was, "You can't wash your hands in a buffalo." :-) Get it?
• Every year, Custer State Park holds a lottery for a buffalo hunt every winter. Ten winners (out of about a thousand entries from all over the US) are chosen. If you are selected, you must send in $4K for the privilege to hunt a buffalo. You can bring your favorite rifle or the park rangers can lend you one. And the hunt goes like this: a ranger is at your disposal for three days, during which you go "shopping" for a buffalo. When you find a nice healthy fluffy juicy buffalo, you and the ranger crawl up very quietly to it, and you get to shoot it -- at point blank. Apparently, it's more humane and safer that way. Then you can have the head stuffed for your wall, have the hide tanned for your floor, and have the meat cut and frozen for your freezer. When all is said and done, you most likely have spent $9k. But apparently, buffalo meat has 20% fewer calories and 30% more protein than beef. And Randy added that the buffalo bulls "that participate in the hunt do so willingly." Uh-huh.
• In the Guinness Book of World Records, the most severe change in weather is in Black Hills -- 47-degree change within 2 minutes.