Black Hills - chapter two - Sylvan Lake

Here is a small piece of the "Big Green Map" by which we navigated the Black Hills for 4 days. We camped at Sheridan Lake Campground which you can see at the center top of the map.

On our LONG DAY of exploration our first stop was at Sylvan Lake located in the tan rectangle at the left center of the map. The Green area is National Forest the tan is State Park. The white bars across the black roads are tunnels. Now these tunnels are not the ordinary tunnel that you just drive through on a two lane road. The black lines, depending on the thickness and emblems, are national, state and county highways. Standard, if sometimes narrow, two lane blacktops. The tunnels on the other hand are definitely ONE LANE the narrowest was only nine - yes I typed 9 - feet wide! The lowest was 10' 10" high. In Michigan you could NOT have narrow one lane tunnels on a two lane road. It would lead to mayhem and deaths. But in the Black Hills everyone approached a the tunnel slowly - by the way you almost never approached a tunnel even nearly straight on, it was almost always it at a sharp angle to the roadway or there was a sharp turn to enter the tunnel. You approached the tunnel slowly and peeked through. Then if there was no one in the tunnel or entering from the other end, you sounded your horn and drove in slowly. Everyone was polite and patient, did not rush at the tunnels, and waited their turn. We only saw two drivers who were less than patient, one from California and one from New York, figures. It was AMAZING! If there had been an accident at one or two tunnels at the same time - it would have been a total snarl. The widest of the tunnels we encountered that day was 13' 7" and there were 6 of those tiny tunnels.

After crawling through the first one we came to Sylvan Lake, It looked interesting and there were lots of people there so we decided there must be something of interest. Turned out it was a local popular local attraction. Once we parked and walked toward the lake we could see why.

Sylvan Lake is an artificial lake laying at the top of a steep valley. In the picture to the right you can just see a white line at the water line in the gap in the foreground rocks, that is the walkway on top of the dam. The lake had a solar powered device anchored near the dam that was attached to a paddle wheel that helped keep the water aerated and circulating to reduce the algae buildup. There were kids and adults fishing along the grassy verge and there were a few people in Kiaks.

We walked around the lake including out on the walkway over the dam. But to get all the way around you had to backtrack from the dam, find a narrow opening through the rocks and follow a steep path into the valley below the dam. There you either walked along the base of the rock wall, across the tiny creek, and around to the other end of the wall or you could choose to hike a treacherous rocky trail down into the very steep mountain valley below. We went part way down the trail that was in many places marked by a pair of handrails to help climbers down or up the steep, rocky climb. In some places steps had been poured with forms and concrete. I can not imagine the work that was done by hand lugging the forms, iron pipes for the railings, and cement up or down that valley to create that trail. It was a very small stream that formed the steep sided valley we climbed a very short way down and back up. ferns grew in the crevices of rocks and trees grew tall to reach above the rim. We met a number of people going up and down the trail as we slowly worked our way along. In some places the trail was over practically vertical rock faces where I clung to the handrails. In other places we stepped over the stream as it flowed between great boulders we walked across the tops of. Or we stepped over the stream on the grassy edges among wildflowers in bloom. Often we stoped to rest in the shade of either the shade of the valley wall or a tree.

Returning to the base of the dam and heading around the far side of the lake, we found very large, tall Ponderosa pines standing hard up against the rock wall. A wildflower meadow greeted us at the edge of the lake as we came from among the rocks and people were spread out along the lake edge setting up picnics.