Camping -- there's just nothing like it. Wide open spaces, unfettered with strip malls, industry, and the clamor of the population. It's good to get out there in nature and recharge your batteries. If you decide to do it for yourselves, however, we heartily suggest that you stay at least two hundred miles away from Sturgis, South Dakota during the first week of August.
Either stay away, or be riding a Harley, cuz darn near everybody else in the area is. They're all heading for the big Black Hills Classic motorcycle rally in Sturgis. It's incredible -- packs of big-twin madness as far as the eyes can see (and the ears can hear). Every campground is filled with bikers -- we stayed at the KOA in Sioux Falls (over 500 miles from Sturgis) and were relegated to "any spot you can find out by the playground." You can see what we found up top. This picture would have been a lot more impressive if we had taken it before all the bikers left -- nothing but tents and bikes and Otto. And the swingset.
Although the Black Hills Classic is nominally open to all makes of motorcycles, it is first and foremost a Harley-Davidson rally. Maybe 1 in 30 bikes we saw was not a Harley. This odd bike out was usually Honda's Winnebago of a motorcycle, the GoldWing. If you can't tell a Honda from a Harley, you could also distinguish the GoldWings by their riders -- typically an older married couple wearing matching helmets (pretty much the only helmets you'll see at Sturgis) and matching windbreakers with the name of their club silkscreened on the back. To top it off, their bikes typically sport both their names stenciled in fancy cursive on the back luggage compartment ("Fred and Jean Forever," read one particularly romantic offering). Not that the Harley code is any more permissive -- if you're not wearing some sort of bandanna around your head, leather on your butt, or boot on your foot, you're pretty much in the minority. Of course, exceptions can be made if there are mitigating circumstances. For example, if your "old lady" is sporting a particularly daring halter top on the back of your hawg, allowances can be made for those silly Birkenstocks on your feet. Similarly, if your tattoos are badass enough, it can be OK to wear a pair of Dockers golf shorts. It's a complicated math, and I don't have all the nuances worked out yet, but I am pretty sure that Volkswagen Vans rated pretty low on the totem poles of most folks in attendance. That and people who ride "Sportster" Harleys -- sort of a Junior Harley with a smaller engine than your typical hawg. A piglet, if you will. |
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Harleys tickle me because they're pretty much all about image over substance -- the Andre Agassi of motorcycles, though I think both would love the comparison. They don't go particularly fast, handle particularly well, or hold up for a long time. You can't ride them all that hard because they weigh approximately as much as the first Civil War ironclads, Monitor and Merrimac (I like to throw a little Civil War trivia at ya when I can). Plus, if you lean 'em over in a turn even close to aggressively, you'll scrape off all that expensive chrome and bodywork. This is why, among other reasons, so many people trailer their fancy bikes behind an RV to about 50 miles outside Sturgis, and ride them in from there. It's not about riding -- it's about styling. With this in mind, I can appreciate Harleys, because they do look and sound fantastic. They're not designed to be ridden as much as they are to appeal to some visceral impulse, to the Great American Myth of the lone cowboy, endlessly riding the range. Where Easy Rider meets the Marlboro Man, that's where you find the Harley rider at Sturgis, regardless of whether he sells stocks, lays pipe, or owns a Taco Bell franchise. | |
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Spewing aside, we joined the road with the rumbling hordes and headed for the Black Hills. En route, we checked out the marvel that is the Corn Palace. This has got to be one of the granddaddies of roadside attractions, updated yearly since 1892 with a fresh coat of corn. Not just any coat of corn, either, mind you -- a startling new design is developed and enacted each year, entirely in corn. This means that you can keep coming back to see what they've come up with, year after year. In addition to featuring impressive corn murals, the Corn Palace also serves as home to many civic events, including basketball games. Thought you'd want to know. |
| One Corn Palace can only sustain interest for so long, though, so off we went to the Badlands of South Dakota. Shades of Nixon at the Great Wall were everywhere as Kristanne was heard to remark, "These are, indeed, bad lands." (REFERENCE ALERT -- During a visit to China's Great Wall, then President Nixon was heard to say, "It is, indeed, a Great Wall." Most believed him to be stoned at the time.) Irrelevant and obsolete political references aside, we headed into Badlands National Park, the Golden Eagle Pass once again earning us our admission. The Badlands were amazing -- full of eerie sandstone formations slightly reminiscent of Bryce Canyon, but definitely all their own. With scarcely a digital picture to record our presence, though, we were off, bound for Mt. Rushmore along with seemingly every Harley Davidson that ever rolled off a Milwaukee assembly line. |  |
Mt. Rushmore was great -- very impressive. However, once you've looked at it, there's just really not a whole heckuva lot else to do. So, we looked and we left, bound for the nascent Crazy Horse memorial. The Crazy Horse memorial is similar to Mt. Rushmore, inasmuch as its a giant sculpture of someone carved out of rock. There, however, the similarities end. The Crazy Horse memorial is being undertaken completely without federal aid as a gift to all American Indians. It is funded by the Sioux (and other tribes), private donations, and the amazing $14 they wanted to charge folks to come on in. Since you could see the sculpture from the road, we didn't, heading for the Black Hills, instead.
As we drove further and further into the forest, passing spots where the movie, "Dances With Wolves" was filmed, it began to look like it would happen. Amazingly enough, there just weren't that many folks around, even though the motel and bar at the turn-off for the dirt road had been packed with Harleys. Fortunately for us, it did happen. We found a fantastic campsite in an amazingly quiet campground right next to a tiny little spring creek. It was perfect. We set up camp, and then I headed out to go fishing for the first time since the Tuolumne River, back in California.
This was an entirely different kind of fishing, though. Spring creeks have a constant flow at a fairly constant temperature, so they can be very small and still hold surprisingly large fish. This stream, for example, was no wider than three to four feet in most places. However, it did have many fairly deep sections, with gin-clear water and undercut banks. To make matters difficult, it was completely overgrown on both sides -- you had to stand well back of the water. This is a different kind of fishing than what I'm used to -- it requires more stealth than casting ability, sneaking up on fish from behind shrubs and rocks to dapple a fly onto the water. You pretty much never actually cast the fly, only drop it from the rod onto the water. It was great fun, though -- I hooked and lost a nice trout on my first cast, and then got several others to rise in the same area before deciding to hike upstream. There, I hooked and landed a nice 13-inch brook trout on a #18 Adams, having crawled on my knees up to the pool to do so. I felt pretty darn good, even managing to land one more brookie before heading back to the van to help Kristanne put together our engagement album. By the way, this completes our Grand Slam of Trout for the summer -- we've now caught at least one rainbow, cutthroat, brown, and brook trout. I know, I know -- pretty exciting, eh? Well, for those of you who don't care about fish, we also got Today's Scenic Shot there.
Check back tomorrow as we head to Montana -- cross your fingers for clear rivers!
Total Miles for 8/3 = 526