This morning, we did a bit of logistics before even getting up–we did a bit of geography review and hotel availability research and I decided, with a bit of hesitation, that two nights in a town called Hot Springs, not too far from the various places we wanted to see in South Dakota, would be good, even though the town’s website made me think it was going to be hideous. But the price at the Super 8 was right at $ 85 per night, and so I booked them on Expedia, even though it meant driving about 400 miles today. Mark said that would be doable, and what we wanted to see on the way was pretty minimal. That mission accomplished, we had another mediocre hotel breakfast, and took off around 8 am. We started by getting gas and were very proud to find out that we managed to get 56 mpg out of our last 7 gallon’s worth of gas, thanks to the slow driving in Yellowstone and lots of regenerative breaking while rolling downhill.
Our first stop was not far from Billings, only about an hour Southeast–it was the Little Bighorn Battlefield, where we walked around for about half an hour. I have to say that mostly it made me really angry and really sad, so I was glad when we left. I know it’s possible to see it as a victory day for the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Sioux in their battle against a complete idiot of a commander who sacrificed 276 men & himself in his arrogance about the number of enemies he was facing. But of course, mostly it’s part of the horrific loss that the Native Americans sustained as they were first corralled into the reservations, and then stripped again of whichever one of these suddenly seemed valuable to white people again, as happened with the Black Hills in the 1870s, when gold was found and the Laramie treaty was rendered invalid. And yes, the national park people have tried to rectify the history of Little Bighorn in recent years by putting red stone markers where Indian warriors fell, alongside the white marble all over that marks the dead white soldiers (and their Crow Indian scouts), and by building a warrior memorial complementing the soldier memorial. But the warrior memorial was only completed in 2013, and the markers were only begun to be placed in 1999, and it is still appalling to me that it’s taken this long for the history of the “losers” to be addressed in some way or another. I do have to say though that the site is beautiful, and the fact that three free-ranging horses walked by the site as we were at the warrior memorial made it almost okay to be there. Nonethess, I was glad when we continued on our way.
We then drove for quite a while, stopping briefly to have fast-food lunch (our first, I think–we’ve been very good about the picnics) in Gillette, and then driving on to Devils Tower (no apostrophe due to a clerical error). That particular stop was more impressive than I thought, and I am glad we stopped and walked the 1.3 mile trail around this massive thing, which might have been one of three geologic phenomena–a vulcanic plug, or one of two types of other magma formation, which stayed behind because of its extreme resistance to erosion, after the mile-high layer of sandstone around it had eroded away. Like the Giant’s Causeway and the formations we saw in part of the Yellowstone canyon wall, the whole thing consists of mostly hexagonal columns, and is enormous–over 800 feet up, with a huge boulder field of fallen columns around it. It’s sort of nature’s Cologne Cathedral–you look up and up and can’t believe how high it is. Even the boulderfield is like the trim that keeps breaking off and falling down from the cathedral–except of course much, much more impressive than anything humans could build. Of course, humans try to conquer it anyway–in this case, the technical climbers, who love to scale the huge columns. We saw a good dozen at various spots, and over the course of a year (mostly in the summer) it’s about 5,000 climbers. It was fascinating to watch and photograph them–they really clarified the scale of the whole tower, which really does look like the stump of a giant tree, complete with a slight twist at the bottom as if the trunk had roots.
We spent a little over an hour at Devils Tower, and then drove out of Wyoming, down state routes through the Black Hills into South Dakota. It was beautiful driving through the Black Hills, but they are not spectacular where our route took us–nice foresty areas with a bit of bright red sandstone in between, but apparently elsewhere the formations are much more impressive. So we’ll see some of that tomorrow. For today, we just drove on until we were in Hot Springs, at about 6 pm, and found our Super 8. We then went out to dinner and were in for a surprise. The town was not at all what I thought it was, even through its outskirts are all ugly hotels and big touristy restaurants with cheesy names like Woolly’s (for the Mammoth fossils that are on show here, and that we’ll check out tomorrow). The downtown is from the 1890s, when the crazy for healthy waters attracted ritzy hotels, spas, and sanatoriums, including a V.A. hospital built in the early 1900s for soldiers with TB, and today used for V.A. drug rehab and PTSD patients. The buildings are massive and remarkably uniform red sandstone buildings, and up on top of the cliffs, a number of adorable Victorian gingerbread houses. We were absolutely gawking at this stuff, especially since there are these grandiose stairs going up to the V.A. hospital, also on top of a cliff. Sadly, though, this is not bringing tourists for some reason–they sleep here and then drive up to Mount Rushmore or the Black Hills, all north up here–and the town is dying, with many of the sandstone buildings on the main street in disrepair or for sale, while apparently there is a threat that the V.A. hospital will be closed–surely the last straw for this beautiful little town. We had lovely Mexican food in a restaurant that clearly closed right after we left as the last guests, and even icecream in a little shop owned by Floridians that put a Manatee outside their store. We came home from our walk surprisingly lovely walk at about 8:30, did laundry and again called it an early night.