Spearfish, Lead, and Deadwood

Ok, we had one day off from touring and it was a good one to take off, because it was the hottest. The temperature hit 100 degrees, but it was a dry heat. We did a few errands and then hit the pool. It was very refreshing, even with all the kids splashing around and making a lot of noise. It wasn’t the Sun-N-Fun pool in more ways than one. We enjoyed it though.

So the next day was much cooler; about 24 degrees so. Wow! It did not start off well though. Geoff tried to apply a new charge to the air conditioning in the car, which had been having trouble keeping up with the heat lately. He tried the “AC Pro” we had seen on TV and it seemed pretty simple. However, the A/C compressor started making some strange sounds right afterwards and it seemed to be over pressurized. Bah! Now it looks like we will have to get it looked at on Monday and hopefully they can fix it in one day, the last one we are scheduled to be in South Dakota.

Anyway, we took Dave and Myra’s car and headed for the Northern edge of the Black Hills. The first stop was in Spearfish, where we visited the D.C. Booth Historic Fish Hatchery. It was developed to hatch trout and populate the South Dakota streams, which did not have any trout. They went all the way to Yellowstone to get the eggs and then bring them back and raise the fish to pan size before sending them to the streams in a rail car. They still raise the fish but now receive them as fingerlings from other hatcheries. They also house archives of all US hatcheries.

After a great lunch in Spearfish, we headed down the Spearfish Canyon, a stunning drive through towering cliffs along Spearfish Creek.

From the end of the canyon it was a short drive into Lead (pronounced “leed”, not “led”). The name refers to a vein of gold that “leads” to a richer strike. Gold was mined in the area a lot from the 1900s to the end of the Twentieth Century. We visited the Black Hills Mining Museum which has a simulated mine which is pretty good. Also, Ellyn and Myra panned gold.

Finally, we moved on through Deadwood to a monument created by the actor Kevin Costner called Tatanka, The Story of the Bison. It was originally going to be a hotel and destination as a tribute to the Native Americans of the Black Hills region, but it is just a visitor’s center and a very impressive sculpture garden depicting a buffalo jump, where buffalo are chased off a cliff. Although the light was wrong for some good pictures, Geoff took multiple exposures which could be processed into HDR images. They came out really nice.