Into the Black HIlls

Day 10: Comanche Park Camground, near Custer, South Dakota

Distance traveled: 482.9 km

Cumulative distance: 3965 km

Maximum speed: 134 kph

Moving average: 95 kph

Temperature range: 15.6 – 32.0 C

Given that we were camping right at the foot of Big Horn National Forest, as soon as we broke camp, we were right into the squiggles. On the road at 9:00 a.m. being that we were in a deep valley, the
temperature was already a balmy 21 degrees, though as we twisted up through the pass, it promptly cooled off to just over 15. There was a brilliant sun lighting up the area and we yawned our way to the pass; I would have been thankful for a cup of coffee to kickstart my morning but that was a some time off.

Big Horn is a mass of rock faces, cliffs and deep gorges. Along the road, we kept seeing signs that named the geological time period and the age: 250 million, 500 million, 3 billion years. The ages were determined through a scientific process of identifying the graffiti left behind by high school grads. Some things never change, even after billions of years.

We had our first stop in Buffalo, after a great 75 minute ride through pretty good twists and turns. Not quite Chief George good, but pretty awesome nonetheless. Buffalo turned out to be a pretty important stop as we had suffered our first casualty of the trip: the stuff sack housing our sleeping mats. Not our bags, but the thin, slightly inflatable air mattresses. The stuff sack was designed to be water resistant, making it suitable for a canoe trip where the canoe tips and the stuff sack keeps the content dry, assuming it doesn’t make its own way down river for the rest of the trip. It had a volume of 20 litres, perfect for our two mats rolled out together with all the air squeezed out. However, we had seemed to find that our two dinner bowls couldn’t quite find a place of their own and we had taken to dropping them to the bottom of the stuff sack , which was about the same diameter as the bowls, and then forcing the sleeping mats on top of the bowls. It was a squeeze, but seemed to be working fine up until yesterday when a micro-tear appeared near the top of the bag. Now, one of the principals of these bags is that you stick inside whatever you need to keep dry, and then roll down the top and clip, forcing the air out and making a nice, water-tight seal. Even if we aren’t canoeing. Someone who shall remain nameless, but not me, was forcing the 21 litres of contents into the 20 litre bag. There was soon a blowout of massive proportions, the mats bursting out of the stuff sack like Alien from that guy’s insides. Even driving along the highway, the bike looked like the inside of the Nostromo.

So, Buffalo is a town of about 3,000 people and our task was to find a sporting goods store that might carry something like a stuff sack. To me, it seemed highly improbable. We also needed to find a really good coffee place. Lo and behold, going down main street, we saw “Cowgirl Coffee Shop” and “Buffalo Sporting Goods” all in the space of about three seconds and we figured our problems were solved. Until we had a disagreement about which place we should visit first. No matter, Cowgirl was closed. But walking into Buffalo Sports, all we saw were fishing flys, rods and guns. A LOT of guns. However, in one corner of the store was the “stuff sack department” with a selection of about 50 different sizes, styles and makes. And they apologized because their selection was diminished due to the lateness in the season. I said it didn’t matter, we were taking one of those stuff sacks no matter what.

Pronghorn antelope.

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There was a faster way to Comanche Park but our cardinal rule was “no interstates”, so we rode from Buffalo to Kaycee, about 75 km south, on Highway 190, which paralleled Interstate 25. It was ironic to us that we were bombing along a fun, curvy (not to be confused with squiggles), hilly, old highway that allowed us to go plenty fast (not quite interstate fast, but fast enough) and have a fun time doing it. Plus, there was virtually no traffic whatsoever. We were having a ball arcing through the curves, feeling the bike lose a little gravity as we would come over a rise and then swoop back down getting a gravity assist. All along the way, we were seeing dozens of prong horn antelopes, sometimes single animals, sometimes in larger groups. These are reputed to be the fastest land mammals in the western hemisphere, though their big handicap is that they are poor jumpers so fences are a problem for them.

From Kaycee we rode to Newcastle a little town only 50 km from our destination and this took us a couple of hours. Nan opined that it was the most boring part of our trip; it was endless miles of rolling grassland with the occasional oil pump jack. We did see two drilling rigs though, and judging by the amount of drill pipe they had, it looked like they were going deep. It was a bit of a surprise to me, with $48 oil. The other diversion was the Thunder Basin Coal operation. This was a huge coal mine, with coal being extracted by very large draglines and deposited into very long trains taking the coal away to who knows where. That totaled about ten minutes of diversion.

We made our campground and even though we had two nights booked, which was a necessity in order to get a reservation, we made the decision that we would burn the second night and just push on as per the original plan. The campground is nothing special, so we don’t feel like we are missing much.