There are two major caves run by the National Park Service: Wind Cave in Hot Springs SD and Jewel Cave in Custer SD. Since cave tours are suspended at Wind Cave due to elevator replacement, we snagged a tour at busy Jewel Cave for 1:00 pm.
That left our morning free in Hill City. We had passed the small "dinosaur museum" on the main street several times without going in, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity to visit. Bruce's friend Steve Simpson highly recommended The Museum at Black Hills Institute, so we had to visit. What a remarkable small museum. The number of actual and reproduction dinosaur skeletons is amazing.
I also learned a lot more about the history of Sue, Chicago's own T-Rex at the Field Museum. See the sign above.
So, on to Jewel Cave. We got there early and did a nice short walk on the Roof Trail, less than a mile. Then it was down into the cave with our group and a ranger escort. Jewel Cave is so extensive that much of it has not yet been mapped. Cave explorers go into the cave with specialized tools for measuring and recording their location. There are several "base camps" with sleeping bags and portable "facilities" so that cave explorers can reach even further into the cave. We asked, and yes, they must pack out all their waste (even "that").
Jewel Cave is made of limestone and has many levels, as shown in the first photo below. For casual visitors like us, there are lots of stairs, some pretty steep. The weather gods had been smiling on us the whole trip so far but decided that it would be okay to rain since we were underground. However, it continued to rain for our 80-mile drive to Deadwood, our next destination. We decided to follow Apple Maps' quickest route, which looked like an interesting ride in the countryside over roads we hadn't already traveled. That was fine for a while until we found ourselves on a gravel road. The rain kept the dust down, but the road got progressively worse and we ran into construction where the road was one-way only. We stopped behind a small truck to wait for a "pilot" to lead us through the construction zone. How bad could it be? There was a section where there was no road at all, only mud, and another section of fist-sized rocks that banged up under the car so much that I was afraid we'd rupture something under there. At the end, we were so happy to come out on a normal gravel road, and ecstatic to come upon an actual paved road. I made a short video of the road, with audio commentary.
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May 2024
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