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Traveling on - SoDak and NoDakSep 17, 2007
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Whitetail Deer and wild turkeys in Black Hills
Bighorn Sheep in Black Hills
Dogs, contemplating what it means to be located at the geographical center...
| We left the Black Hills, which is a heck of a nice place with some amazing rocks and lots of wildlife. The ponderosa pine trees in the black hills are generally smaller and have more limbs than the same species in Idaho and Oregon. In the southern areas it was mostly what the loggers would call bull pine or apppletrees with lots of low, large limbs. In some of the area it is oak mixed with ponderosa pine which makes for some terriffic wild turkey and whitetail deer habitat. We traveled north via Deadwood, which is interesting but heavily touristed with lots of casinos, and Sturgis, which is an attractive, quiet and clean town on a Sunday morning in September, but which has lots of large drinking establishments to accomodate the famous motorcycle rally. The old Dodge turned 100,000 miles on the odometer rolling down mainstreet in Sturgis - finally got it broken in so it can run right. Stopped by Belle Fourche to see if I could do more family research, but the museum was closed so I turned the dogs loose and admired the "Center of the USA" monument located near the museum. Western South Dakota and SW North Dakota is mostly flat, open prairie, rolling hills and grasslands. I thought there were a lot of antelope in Wyoming, but there may be more in the area we just passed through. Also, there are oil wells and coal fields all along this route. The town of Hazen,where we are staying,and the neghboring town of Beula have several synthetic fuel plants, coal gasification plants and coal-fired electric plants and we passed a huge shovel working in a coal strip operation this afternoon. Also passed a state wildlife management area which was several thousand acres of reforested coal mine spoils that had more trees than we had seen in two days. I'm having trouble sending e-mails on my usual system - must have something to do with the unsecured nature of the RV park WiFi systems. I'll try to figure it out when we get near a larger city. |
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