Spearfish and Devils

The first picture looks like an ordinary breakfast buffet line, but it has a story. We spent the night in the Franklin Hotel, not our best overnight accommodations because it was old, creaky, and the toilet intermittently ran during the night. But hey, it’s historic! We did get a coupon for half off their Sunday brunch at the hotel’s sister location just across the street. It was a pretty good brunch buffet, so I took a picture of the line. Phillip went back a second time for the gooey caramel rolls they had, as I had gotten one and it was delicious. If you note in the picture, the plates are in stacks near the food station. They are on those spring-loaded stands that push them up as one plate is taken off. Apparently, just before Phillip got his plate for the caramel roll, a worker had overloaded the stand with plates. Phillip said the stack was fairly high and slightly leaning when he took the top plate. As soon as he lifted it his plate off, the stack raised, but because of the tilt, the plates started falling. Remember, it was spring-loaded. The stack just kept feeding out plates, sending them crashing to the floor. About thirty plates bit the dust. From our table, I could see the plates break on the floor, but didn’t realize that Phillip had started the cascade until he came back with his roll. I didn’t want to walk over and take a picture, as it took the workers several minutes to sweep up the plate pieces that had basically covered the floor of the serving area. Can’t take Phillip anywhere, right?

We left Deadwood and stopped in the next town, Lead, to visit a mining museum; however, I forgot it was Sunday morning and the museum didn’t open till noon. We contented ourselves with examining the outside displays before proceeding. The clerk at the woodcarving shop had recommended driving the Spearfish Scenic Byway. She had been right about the Purple Pie Shop, so I amended our route to take the byway. Just as we got on it, we had to come to a complete stop in the road. A doe walked in front of us then waited on the side, looking back across the road. We knew what that meant, and sure enough, these two scampered out and crossed the road to mama.

The Spearfish Byway took us thru more of the Black Hills of South Dakota. I was on the lookout for elk and mountain goats. We did see more deer, usually in the meadows at the base of the mountains. The road followed a stream thru canyons, meandering basically northwest toward the town of Spearfish. No air conditioner needed in the SUV, as the outside temperature remained probably in the low 70s. The traffic was light, although there were other cars on the road. We stopped at some of the overlooks and they were never too crowded.

About half-way along the byway, we saw a sign for Roughneck Falls and a Dances with Wolves filming location. We turned off actually to see the Dances with Wolves location, 3.2 miles down a side road. The side road turned into a packed gravel road, then into a bumpy rutted dirt road, and I told Phillip we could turn around because I could identify which scenes were shot in the area (the final scenes in the mountain snow when the soldiers are chasing the tribe). On our way back out, we stopped at Roughneck Falls and were really glad we did. A boardwalk lead to a viewing area at the top of the falls and then down the hill to the bottom of the falls. The recent rains provided a good flow of water over the falls.  It was a nice little hike back up from the bottom of the falls, but it did prepare us for our next stop at Devils Tower.

Devils Tower is a geological formation of really hard rock that juts up from the land. There are three theories about how it was formed, but they all say it is hardened lava and that the land around it eroded over millions of years, leaving the tower. It is quite fascinating in the closer views. Columns of rock fall off the face, leaving vertical fissures as if some giant had jack-hammered sections away. We walked the Tower Trail, 1.3 miles and not level, around the base of the tower. The trail took us near the granite beds on one side and out in the woods on other sides. It was a nice hike because about 95% was in the shade of the pine trees, even if it was up and down enough to stretch my hamstrings occasionally.

We left Devils Tower and headed south in Wyoming. I’ve mentioned the coal train cars we saw in another state. Today we saw the coal mines. We only drove close enough to one to get a picture, but saw the signs and trucks for several others. Along Highway 59, railroad tracks paralleled the road. Mile long trains full of coal headed south. Empty coal cars headed north. That was a constant sight along this 100 mile stretch of road. We also noticed a lot of oil rigs in the area. The few small towns we passed thru were dotted with new looking modular homes, probably for the oil field and coal field workers of the area.

My final picture of the day shows how much the terrain had changed from the views in the Black Hills. Eastern Wyoming does not get enough rain to have alfalfa fields or corn fields. It is mostly native grasses and those nasty blue-ish gray sticker bushes that are worse than mesquite. We occasionally saw sheep and antelope. We rarely even saw cows. Or people. If I had to pick a place to live, this area would be very low on my list. Interesting to drive thru, but we were not inclined to stop and get out, as there really was nothing for miles and miles. Our stop for the night, in Douglas, Wyoming, has greener views than the land we drove thru. We passed some irrigated bottom land just north of town, and it was nice. Our hotel, a new Sleep Inn, has a pool in which we enjoyed a nice swim to end the day.