Shhh! It’s kind of a secret. Black Hills streams are perfect trout habitats, as fishermen know, but these fish aren’t native to the area. When immigrants swarmed to the Black Hills in the late 1800s, they were surprised to find no trout. All trout caught here today are descended from … Read More
If you grew up in Iowa or Minnesota in the 1960s, and your next door neighbors took a Black Hills vacation, you maybe didn’t recognize their car when it returned. The car would be plastered with bright bumper stickers from every cave, gravity house, and curio shop the neighbors visited. … Read More
You reach Thunderhead Falls by pulling off highway 44 west of Rapid City, feeling lost on a gravel road that’s not well marked, buying a ticket, and trudging unguided into an old horizontal mine drift. A cold stream rushes along the underground path for a couple hundred yards, fed by … Read More
Bridal Veil Falls can embarrass you. It’s visible from the Spearfish Canyon highway (there’s even a new observation deck) and when it cascades full in spring it’s spectacular. It roars and sprays mist, cascading a hundred feet. So a few weeks later you decide to take out-of-state friends up there, … Read More
The restrooms at Deadwood’s iconic Saloon #10 were – to put it kindly – rustic. Maybe not outdoors like a proper outhouse, but they had that kind of ambiance. We’d post a YouTube video but you wouldn’t want to watch it, and no one thought to make that kind of … Read More