June 6th - Custer State Park, South Dakota

The day dawned clear but quite cold—mid 40s according to thermometer but it felt more like the 30-degree weather we experienced during our winter camping in Florida (see Wanderung 1). We thought we would walk the Volksmarch in Custer State Park as practice for the Crazy Horse walk coming up on the following weekend. Since the last part of the Volksmarch route lead straight thru our campground, we started off in the campground with the last instruction and then followed the loop from that point.

The starting point for this Volksmarch was a pretty park lodge built in a log cabin format and located beside a small, scenic lake. From the beginning of the walk we had great views of the wooded valleys and craggy peaks that define the Black Hills. Really, these “hills” are about the size of the Appalachian Mountains, so don’t be fooled—the trail is rocky and steep at points and hiking boots are a must.

The first landmark was the cabin of “Badger” Clark, the poet laureate of South Dakota for many years. He lived as a bachelor in this small, simple log cabin with his huge library and wrote poetry about the west and, particularly, cowboys. It reminded me of Emily Dickinson living alone in her house and writing a large corpus of poetry over several decades. Unfortunately the cabin wasn’t open for viewing until 10 a.m., so we continued to walk into the backwoods area.

The first third of the walk was along a well-graded road that lulled us into thinking the 3+ rating was overdone—we thought it would be a cakewalk! (ta dum bum) But the route turned off into the ponderosa pines and the trail soon became much steeper but also more scenic. We saw mule deer scampering off ahead of us—they are shaped liked regular white tail deer but are gray and have very long ears.

At a branch in the trail, I suddenly came face-to-face with a large bull buffalo coming the other way! Unfortunately, he was coming on the route we were supposed to take and the path was rather narrow at that point. We beat a hasty retreat uphill to a boulder that gave us some psychological protection and leaned against the boulder while we watched him amble along and graze for about 20 minutes. We were close enough to hear the grinding of his teeth as he ate the long trailside grass and I honestly didn’t want to be any closer—my adrenaline levels were high enough already. Just about the time we had decided to detour up the hill around him, he ambled off in the other direction, leaving the route free.

The rest of the walk was very nice, but somehow anticlimactic after the buffalo encounter. We did see beautiful spring wild flowers, some white tail deer, babbling brooks, and grand scenic vistas. At the very end we had to ascend a steep pass before getting back to the campground, and we were tired enough that we had to take this in slow stages. In total the walk took us 3 ½ hours and we were quite happy to get back to camp. All in all this was a great walk and we would highly recommend it to folks who like natural walks. The walk starts at 5,000 feet, which would make it effectively more difficult than the 3+ rating for folks not used to these altitudes. What about the buffalo factor, you say? I was later told that buffalo do not like clapping or singing, so if you meet one on the trail you might try that. As for me, next time that happens to me I figure I will sing loudly and off-key, which is much easier than singing in tune and is guaranteed to scare even humans away! Probably doing “hokey-pokey” would be a good choice for this purpose as long as the A.S.P.C.A. doesn’t find out and charge me with cruelty to buffalo!

We rested a bit and had a nice hot lunch from our store of canned goods and pasta mixes, after which we hopped in the truck to drive back to the Norbeck Visitor Center to have our books stamped. We arrived there just in time for a session on panning for gold that we joined. Gold plays a part in the history of the Black Hills because the gold rush here in the 1870s crowded out the Native-Americans and lead to some of the final battles between the Lakota and the U.S. Calvary. Our purpose was much simpler, to learn how to pan for gold and have some fun.

We each got a pan full of sediment from French Creek, the place where gold was initially discovered by General George Armstrong Custer’s exploratory expedition. Given the historical precedent, we started out with high hopes and great expectations. It turned out to be rather cold fun, especially for Monika who was brave enough to take off her socks and shoes and wade into the creek. Watching her wading in the creek reminded me of her search for fossilized shark teeth at Venice, Florida (see Wanderung 1), but this effort was less successful. She panned in the creek and also handed me up the water for my panning, but neither of us came up with a single flake of gold. Panning for 10 hours a day in the winter with the water temperatures in the 30s must have been grueling work.

After I dried Monika’s feet and she put her shoes and socks back on, we went back to the Visitor Center to pay for the Volksmarch, get our books stamped, and look around. I found books of poetry by Badger Clark, read a couple of poems, and bought the first volume of his work for further perusal. On first blush, his poetry seemed to be a highly romanticized account of aspects of the cowboy life and has much more of a masculine focus than Emily Dickinson’s, which is only to be expected I suppose.

It had started a steady, all-day rain and we were too tired to walk anymore so we decided to drive the wild animal loop, and boy did we see wild animals: pronghorn antelopes, a coyote stalking some deer, a prairie dog town, and of course more buffalo. However, we did not see the herds of buffalo we had hoped, only other bachelors. There also were some wild burros that had gone feral after being used to carrying tourists up a mountain peak in the 50s and then being released into the wild. Unlike any of the other wild animals, the burros were right along the road and had found some tourists willing to pet and feed them. We worked our way back along the rain-slicked roads to our campground and retreated from the rain into our screen house for the rest of the afternoon.