Flintstones Bedrock Campground, Custer, South Dakota. Tachometer – 3640 miles
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We had a long easy morning at the campground, the kids played with the gravel rocks paving our campsite, trying to fit them into empty plastic bottles. Towards noon we left and drove about 45 minutes to get to Wind Cave National Park. The weather deteriorated rapidly and it began to rain heavily.
Wind Cave is a park with two themes. The first is the amazing cave that is one of the world’s largest. It has over 100 miles of charted passages, and only 5% of it has been discovered so far. We parked at the visitor center and had lunch in the RV. We then purchased tickets for one of the ranger led tours of the cave. You cannot tour the caves by yourself. We had some time before our tour and also wanted the girls to nap a bit, so we drove around the park to experience theme number 2. This is the prairie which is protected here. Two hundred years ago, most of the US Midwest looked like this. Gentle rolling hills of grassland, occasional pine forests, and plenty of wildlife. In our one hour drive we spotted several buffalo, mule deer, antelope (sometimes called pronghorn), and prairie dog (actually more like a rat).
The one hour tour of the cave was very cool. We started at the original cave opening which is about half a meter wide. When the first people discovered it there was such a strong wind blowing out of the hole that it blew their cowboy hat off. Hence the name Wind Cave. The cave has some (almost) unique features. One is called “boxworkâ€. Basically when you look at the ceiling you see upside down boxes of different shapes and sizes. There is a whole geological explanation of how these were formed.
The tour was very interesting but we had a hard time entertaining Shir and Orr who were on our backpacks. We took them off, let them walk, switched them between us, but still, not an easy task.
An interesting story the ranger told us is about the first tours to the cave. They were conducted by the family members who discovered the cave. The youngest son was an avid spelunker (cave explorer). One day he took a group of people down to the cave and when they reached a certain point he saw a new hole that he had not checked yet. He asked the group to wait a few minutes while he checked it out. The tunnel kept going and going and the guide got all excited. Eventually the tunnel led to a different way out of the cave. The guide ran home all excited and at dinner told his family. When he got up the next morning he wrote down the details of yesterday in the journal and that’s when he realized he had forgotten something…
After Wind Cave, we drove straight into Custer State Park which is adjacent. The kids were tired and all fell asleep immediately. We drove for about an hour and a half in the scenic “wildlife loopâ€, but saw much less animals than at Wind Cave. There was a small group of beggar mules that accosted some of the vehicles in front of us, but the big herd of buffalo we had hope to see evaded us.
From the park we drove into a town called Custer where we are staying tonight. The campground is called Flintstones and is right next to a theme park of the famous 60’s cartoon show the Flintstones. Tomorrow we will visit in the morning. Yabba Daba Doo.
-Hemi
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Big Trip, North America RV 2007, South Dakota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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