Sunday – Rapid City, South Dakota

Hi everyone, I need to clear up some confusion, so I will do it here and now.

Once again Tom and I went over to the hotel for free breakfast, he was heading out this morning, I was going for a ride to the Devils Tower. This is the bike that is sponsored by Twisted Throttle, it has a lot of farkles on it, they were one of the major prize donators over the past few nights, including a stack of t-shirts, free advertising of course 🙂 I was trying to ‘borrow’ his highway pegs, but he was keeping a close eye on me 🙂

After breakfast I met up with Johnofchar, he had ridden his new DL650 down, the one that was in his garage stripped down when I was there about 3 weeks back or so. He had a brand new shunt for my Kisan Charge Guard for me, I had lent him my spare one back then, but it also turned out to be faulty, so Kisan replaced his and mine, good on em.

John gave me some ideas for rides around the Wyoming and Colorado area, before I headed off to get ready to ride. I had also volunteered to try a new WindStrom windscreen last night and had installed it this morning before breakfast. It was a bit tall for me and meant I would be looking through the screen rather than over it, but I would give it a full days trial. I managed to catch up with Tom and say hooroo, just as he was riding out, well met m8 and I hope to catch you some time later in the south of Texas. 🙂 I headed up the same slab as the past few rides before reaching the town of Sundance, here I headed into Wyoming, but missed the state sign.

I saw this state sign and went back for a photo, it is the bottom line that caught my attention, handle bars that high are called Ape Hangers, because it looks like an ape hanging off them when they ride. I would like to see what happens during Sturgis, because a lot of bikes travel through here to get to there and there are a lot of these illegal bars, some higher than their heads 🙂

I have seen a lot of these wooden barriers out in the fields, weird in that they are see through, made of slats and only go for a short period. They do not form a fence, but a barrier for part of the field, they only seem to be in certain locations, usually on a slope, but not always, and not on both sides of the road at the same time? If anyone knows what they are for, please let me know.

I continued on looking through a distorted view via the screen, until I eventually got my first glimpse of the tower.

As you can see it has been a monument for over 100 years.

I had some more windy roads to get into the actual national park itself, my annual pass got me through again, well worth the initial outlay of $80, it has definitely paid for itself and I am now ahead of the game. Here I stopped and checked out the prairie dogs, cute little things, and they even posed for me!

The Devils Tower, the first time I heard of/and saw this was with the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, it was amazing then and is absolutely amazing in the flesh so to speak, wow!!!

There is an Indian belief about this place but there are also scientific reasoning’s about how it was formed. There are quite a few native names for this place, one of the early white settlers mistook a native explanation to mean ‘the bad god’ and so he called it the Devils Tower. It would be better if the original native names were used, but I doubt that will happen. Their names for the monolith include: Aloft on a Rock (Kiowa), Bear’s House (Cheyenne, Crow), Bear’s Lair (Cheyenne, Crow), Bear’s Lodge (Cheyenne, Lakota), Bear’s Lodge Butte (Lakota), Bear’s Tipi (Arapaho, Cheyenne), Tree Rock (Kiowa), and Grizzly Bear Lodge (Lakota).

After that as it was quite hot, I declined to walk around the base and headed off for some different viewpoints. There is a lot of free climbing that happens here, but due to native ceremonies during the month of June, it is not allowed.

So, I headed back via the northern loop of Hulett and Alva, the road was full of tar snakes which kept the speed down, especially on the corners, but not long after it got better, so the riding was better as well 🙂

After a short period I stopped at the small town of Aladdin, population 15 and it had a snack bar which I had been told about. I had some prawns and chips(shrimp and fries), very nice and had a great chat with some other travellers and Cindy the owner and I think it is her daughter, a very nice place for a stop. Check out the drunken donkey on the display 🙂

Then I headed east and because I was going to fast on the interstate coming into Wyoming, I managed to get a good photo here on a back road 🙂

Then I had ten miles of grooved road, they are doing major road works and this stuff sucked, you are constantly moving all over the road, it is not dangerous, just uncomfortable!

Here is another of those pointless fences, as you can see it starts and stops and does not block anything at all, if it was there to block animals, they would go around, and I am sure deer could jump over them!

I stayed on the back roads until Whitewood and slabbed it back to RC, I saw the traffic severely slowed in the other direction, it looks like an RV had overturned.

After getting back I managed to write up last Thursdays blog entry then wandered over for a beer and found a small group of late stayers, but this was going to be a quiet evening as I was about beered and karaoked out by now!

After a couple I headed over to the Chinese shop for a take away meal, Tom had said they were good but there is no aircon, so don’t sit and eat. The meal was big and cheap, during his slow moments, the owner is busy fixing his car 🙂

After that I wrote some more stuff and had an early night for a change. I was leaving in the morning and had spoken to Jim and Lesley, they were south of Denver, which is south of me and we would tentatively meet up on Tuesday night. I had still a few things to achieve, that was Mt Rushmore and the one that is a definite on any visitors card, Crazy Horse mountain 🙂

Day – 230 miles and 370 km
Trip – 21,900 miles and 33,245 km

Cheers
TravellingStrom

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