RV'ing near Custer State Park, SD, USA

CUSTER STATE PARK

We are staying in an RV park just outside of the state park but drive thru the park on most of our trips to see the sights. The Black Hills of South Dakota have beautiful sights to offer and many animals roaming free, who seem to enjoy getting their pictures taken.

Beautiful buffalo bull

I am not sure the sound I heard from the buffalo was saying he was happy, maybe not all animals enjoy picture posing ! It was kind of a huffing sound, but maybe they just have a ‘purring’ sound like a kitten?? He is a beauty, but I kept my distance and was behind the truck and with the zoom lense was able to get what seems to be a close-up. There is no doubt that a herd of buffalo is far more intimidating than a herd of cattle.

                                            Free range buffalo go where they wish

The buffalo free range the park but people are warned that buffalo are dangerous and do not approach them. There are as many as 1500 head of North American bison, more commonly known as buffalo. They can grow to 6 feet tall and weigh more than 2000 lbs.

There is a round up done yearly and has become a great public event held in September, attracting up to 11,000 people. I can only imagine what it would feel and sound like when 1500 buffalo are pounding the trail to come to the corrals. This is when the size of the herd is adjusted, according to the predicted availability of grassland forage. The young are vaccinated and they’re all checked out by a veterinarian.

                                                                         Mule deer

Mule Deer just go wherever they want. We’ve seen them all over, especially at dusk enjoying the grassy fields, the parkland or private yards. This is a very rural area so for the most part they are doing no harm. They hop a fence with such grace and ease, and go into yards and help themselves to delicious plants, if there are any left. It looks like most people have their gardens surrounded by wire mesh. Deer are beautiful and there are plenty of them but I am sure they can be a pest at times.

Wild turkey
We didn't see a lot of turkey but they were seen scampering across the road a few times on our trip.

Mountain goat nursing her young

On one of our visits to Mt. Rushmore, we had just started up the walk of flags when there was a mountain goat, then a baby one on the hillside adjacent to the walkway. We watched for a few minutes and managed to get a picture of the baby feeding from mom. They were barely interested in all the spectators that they had, guess they’re used to that.

An inquisitive burro

We passed a herd of burros as we travelled the road. They’re very curious and not in any hurry to get off the road and out of the way. The are not to be given food, but it looks like they may just have been treated on occasion and get their nose in the window, just in case. Burros are not native to the Black Hills but are descendents of those brought here to haul visitors to the top of Harney Peak. Following discontinuation of the rides, the burros were released into the park.

                                                                   Bighorn sheep

We also saw some Bighorn Sheep who are part of the Rocky Mountain bighorn brought here once the original Audubon subspecies became extinct about 1920. Their coats consist of short hair, not wool. They are very similar to the ones we see at home in Kamloops, BC, Canada.

I think the most surprising thing that I learned was that the animal management tool used in the park is hunting programs. The fees collected thru hunting licenses help fund wildlife management programs. Species managed through hunting in the park include bison, elk, deer and turkey. The only one we didn’t see on our travels thru the parks is the elk, but they are shy and stay fairly hidden.

Other wildlife calling the park home are Whitetail Deer, coyotes, mountain lions, and bobcats. The pronghorn are often incorrectly called antelope, so we may have seen them plus the prairie dogs seen scampering across the road.

Williston, ND, to Wyoming

We love RVing so much that we are on our 2480 km (1550 mi) detour into the USA.
We stayed at Buffalo Trails Campground, who has WiFi but we had none, even though our spot was supposed to have it. It was a rainy evening, which may have been a problem for wifi, and no satellite for TV so we spent time on our computers

Next morning, we followed #85 south on a cloudy morning. The local time is Central but we go back into Mountain Time later in the day. We decided that we’d follow ‘Our Time’, a new time zone. ‘Our Time’ is we sleep when we’re tired, ‘Our time’ is we eat when we’re hungry and ‘Our Time’ is we stop driving when we’re ready. One of the benefits of retirement and rv’ing, we’re in our own world and our own time zone !.
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The terrain in N. Dakota south of Williston is a lot of rolling hills so there are a lot of ups and downs in the roads but they’re fairly straight. We crossed the Missouri River, although I wasn’t ready with my camera, and that was pretty.

oil rigs

There are oil rigs scattered through out the state. Right in the middle of a harvested field there will also be an oil digging operation. We’d seen lots of them in Saskatchewan and they started appearing in the Dakota’s, too.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

We dropped down into the valley of the Little Missouri Scenic River and saw the most beautiful Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I took pictures from the truck then stopped at the viewpoint for more, these pictures do not do justice to the scenery we saw. Too many clouds make it so dark and they lose color in the photo.
Once we crossed the bridge we were entering the Little Missouri National Grasslands, and we had to stop for more pictures. Beautiful.

Field of sunflowers

We had seen several different crops in the many fields we’d seen thru the Canadian Prairies and down thru the States, but none surprised us more than the fields of sunflowers that we saw.

dummy in car

Stopped to have lunch in the RV at Amidon, ND. They had a police car with a dummy in it parked roadside at the north end of the tiny town. There was a speed limit calculator there showing your speed. The real police had someone pulled over the other end of town, a block away. The town consisted of some vacant buildings, making it look like a ghost town and with the dummy police in the car, could have been a movie but it obviously worked for catching speeders !

Home on the range

We entered Wyoming twice. Once because we were on the wrong highway, and drove into Montana, so we took the next turn and we were back into Wyoming. (It gave me two chances to get a picture of the sign welcoming us into Wyoming and I missed them both.) It added about 20 miles to the day but it also had us driving thru such pretty country and the sun had come out by then. We could say it was intentional in order to say we were in Montana, but we had done that the day before when we drove from Saskatchewan to Williston, ND.

When we got into Wyoming, the range was so pretty with the sun shining, I told Keith I had this desire to sing “Home on the Range, where the deer and the antelope play” that was going around in my head ! Then within minutes, and I am not kidding, we saw some antelope in the field. Not 2 minutes later, we saw some deer ! And basically all we’d seen all day to that point had been cattle. That is one of the strangest coincidences I have ever had.

On that same Hwy 112, we saw so many more deer we wondered if they were farming them. At home we might see two or three together, here we were seeing herds of them. We also saw wild turkeys a couple of times. We’d seen buffalo earlier and I did not get one picture of any of these animals, we were driving and weren’t able to get a photo.

Follow us on this detour into USA and our journey
http://we-love-rv-ing.blogspot.com/2009/08/devels-tower-to-keystone-sd-detour.html