Nearly two years ago, we joined some friends on a November trip to Rapid City, South Dakota. We arrived on a cool November day with the fading fall light giving everything a subdued hue. It was Congressional mid term election season and signs for political preferences were everywhere decorating roadsides and front yards.
We watched deer in the yard of our Airbnb at all hours of the day and visited Rapid City as the weather turned decidedly from fall to an icy winter day. On our way out of town we made a quick detour to Mount Rushmore to honor our prestigious Presidents carved into that hard rock.
Now we find ourselves, in the heart of summer, headed across the plains in 90-degree heat. We overnighted in Sioux Falls at a budget Marriott hotel chocked full of enthusiastic boys headed from Minnesota to Iowa with a short detour to run through the hotel hallways in excited exuberance for their road trip and hotel stay.
The morning greeted us with fog and a light mist as we turned the car westward towards the Black Hills. Interstate 90, or perhaps it should be called the highway of endless billboards, was packed with Harley Davidsons being ridden or trailed westward towards Sturgis. I thought: “wow, that’s a lot of motorcycles” but as they say, you ain’t seen nothing yet. More on that later…
Riding westward, the topography changed from the flat plains, cornfields and soybeans you might associate with the Midwest to wild, rolling hills and ranch land you’d associate with the American west and as we rolled into the Mountain Time zone we felt that much closer to home.
Badlands National Park. The Badlands were named as such by French trappers in the mid 1700s who called this area “les malvaises terres” (badlands) as it was too difficult to drag their stuff across and traverse the land. The expression was adopted by the Lakota people who called it, in their language, “Mako sica”.
In 1935, famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited here and wrote: “I’ve been around the world a lot…but I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands. What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere.”
75 million years ago, this area was covered by a sea, whose effects you can still see in some of the smoother stones of the park. As continental plates shifted, mountains were thrust upward forcing the water to retreat and drain away. A subtropical forest emerged but as the climate cooled the forest gave way to savannah and then to prairie.
11,000 years ago, mammoth hunters roamed these areas and much later nomadic tribes hunted bison here. The Sioux, or Lakota, came to dominate the region using horses from the Spaniards. The first European arrivals were the French fur trappers who are credited with naming the region.
We drove the loop road (highway 240) from Cactus Flat to Wall where the topography changes from prairie to stunning rock formations which you can see for miles as you approach from the north and east. Sculpted spires, basins of silt and colorful mounds accompany you as you drive south, then west, then north. It really does leave a feeling of “mysterious elsewhere”.
While in Wall, we had to visit Wall Drug to see what all the billboard hubbub was about but lasted exactly 5 minutes in this indescribably horrible tourist trap before hopping back in the car and heading west… to Sturgis.
Sturgis. We happened to be in town during the 84th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. If I’d thought I’d seen a lot of bikes on I-90 or in Badlands National Park, I was a fool. It is a somewhat indescribable spectacle. Another “mysterious elsewhere” of a more modern kind. The banner welcoming you to town says: “the ride, the roar, the rally”. The shirts read “Biker Barbie” or “Good girls go to heaven, Bad girls go to Sturgis”, bikini-clad bike washers were available to rinse off that road dust and sewing machines lurked on street corners ready to sew on Sturgis 2024 patches. And if you want a good lawyer, the roadside signs read: “what happens in Sturgis stays in Sturgis… if you have a good lawyer”. I have no clue where all these people stay in this small town (a biker later told us they stay in all the surrounding towns and fill the campgrounds for miles) and yet they come, annually.
The motorcycle club the Jackpine Gypsies started the rally in 1938 with a focus on stunts and racing. By the 1960s, the rally included hill climbs, motocross and daredevil stunts. The 75th anniversary rally, in 2015, hosted more than 750,000 people.
The sounds of Harley Davidson and Indian bikes reverberate through town. There are just… so… many of them. It was loud, it was a bit rowdy (even at 3pm), it was somewhat overwhelming, and it was… kinda fantastic. If life is about your experiences, this is one we are glad to have had. And while we didn’t exactly fit in with our untattoed skin, shorts and sneakers and absence of leather, we never felt unwelcome. All seem welcome here so long as you live and let live. Just spend the night… out of town.
Speaking of staying out of town… we chose to stay in a tiny house Airbnb in Spearfish, just up the road from Sturgis. It was perfectly located for visiting other Black Hills sights. Deer would graze in our adjacent yard in the dusk hours, and later, bats would dive overhead as night fell. The hot tub enabled staring up at the stars in this dark sky country. Even the ever-present rumble of Harleys going to and from the rally was, in a way, soothing.
Deadwood. We drove over the pass from Spearfish to Deadwood to check it out. In 1876, miners came to the Black hills and Deadwood was born. It became a true western town with plenty of outlaws. Wild Bill Hickock was gunned down here while playing cards and he’s buried here next to Calamity Jane.
While the outlaws may be gone, or at least not overtly obvious, this once dusty western town is now chocked full of casinos and tourist shops. It was also chocked full of Sturgis Ralliers. We’d planned to grab some lunch but couldn’t find what we were looking for, so we headed back to Spearfish, our favorite of the area towns we have visited, for some delicious fish tacos at REDwater kitchen.
Sources:
The Traveling Ridleys 
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