Saturday, October 6, 2007

The Black Hills - chapter one

From Wall South Dakota we took I-90 west past Ellsworth Air Force Base to Rapid City and entered the Black hills.

The Black Hills is an "island of trees in a sea of grass", a small isolated mountain range in western South Dakota and east Wyoming. It is a complicated dome of rock layers resembling an oval bulls eye, which have been eroding for over 2 million years since their uplift from the plains surrounding them. I loved studying geology in college but when I tried to understand what was happening in the Badlands and the Black Hills and the mountains in Wyoming and Montana I was lost in the complications. I live in an area of the world that was repeatedly covered by a series of continental glaciers that left their jumbled deposits behind. Our house is built on an sandy moraine above a wide glacial river bed. Glacial geology is very complicated but the remains you can see are not very old, 10,000 to 12,0000 years in our area. However during our trip to the west we were in areas that had evidence of long gone valley glaciers, great ancient uplifts of even more ancient complicated sedimentary deposits. Interpretive materials talked in terms of Millions of years - many millions even billions of years of geological forces. Repeated volcanic activity, sedimentation, uplift and erosion redeposited and uplifted and eroded again before our eyes. I gave up trying to understand and just enjoyed knowing that what I was seeing was ancient and complicated and beautiful.

Our first stop in the Black Hills National Forest was at Pactola Lake Visitors Center. Pactola Lake is actually a large reservoir, which provides the Rapid City water supply, laying behind a dam on the Rapid River. The visitor center building is a beautiful edifice holding a very nice interpretive exhibit of the natural and human history of the area, warnings about forest fires, souvenir sales area, and a large glass wall looking out over the lake. The shore line looked very odd - there seemed to be a wide band of bare ground between the water line and the trees. We were told that due to the drought they had been suffering for a number of years that the lake was 30 feet low. Of course it was still over a hundred feet deep - so not to worry. We spent some time talking with staff and volunteers at the visitors center and were given lots of suggestions on where to camp and what to see while we were there.

The map we were given was colored, had lots of detail, and was torn off a pad of maps. We later learned that everywhere we went including stores in areas surrounding the Black Hills, there were pads of these maps affectionately called "the big green map" I included a scanned excerpt of the area of the map which shows our next day's explorations in my Picasa photo album. You can find it under the maps link here


We chose Sheridan Lake Campground and found a spot among large Ponderosa Pines to call home for the next four days. The host warned us that they had been having unseasonably hot humid weather and even the nights had been hot and humid. Fortunately the weather relented and while not cool during the day the nights provided comfortable sleeping weather. Here was my first experience with National Forest Campgrounds. There were no hookups but there was a dump station available and there were pit toilets - not too bad at this campground if you got there soon after they were cleaned everyday-, and a pitcher pump with pretty good water. I learned how to take a "navy" bath using the shower and a dish pan to catch the gray water. I could wash my hair and bathe with only two pans three quarters full of water and feel clean. Our retired Navy friend in whose yard we camped our first night out would not have called it a navy shower, I used too much water. But we managed to not fill up our gray water tank by washing dishes outdoors like the tent campers and dumping the bath water the same way. Husband had been trying to convince me all along that it would work and happily I discovered it would. By the time this trip was over I much preferred a national Forest Camp ground to a full-hook-up one, as long as it was high enough to be cool.

The next day we set off on a journey too far. We laid out way too much to do for one day - but it was and amazing day none the less.

No comments: