Category: outdoors

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Butterfly Week

Story and photos by Olaf Danielson

A mustard white at the Waubay National Wildlife Refuge in Day County.

Every year, a colorful bonanza appears on the prairies of northeastern South Dakota. I call it the”Biggest Week of Butterflies.”

From the last few days of June through July 4, some of the state’s most colorful and shortest-lived residents emerge to mate, lay eggs and impress those who are in the field watching. One of these is the diminutive Dakota skipper (Hesperia dacotae), a prairie butterfly listed in 2014 as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. It appears for its only”flight” of the year, frequently perching on coneflowers awaiting a mate or a lucky photographer.

I didn’t think much about butterflies in my youth. I got into this hobby as a bored bird watcher looking for something to amuse myself. I chase rare bird reports all over the country and have seen every breeding bird in North America. It took 300,000 miles, but in 2016 I saw them all in a single year, plus many other rarities.

Bird watching can get slow in the dog days of summer. A few years ago, I bought a new camera lens in July and needed something to film. An orange butterfly caught my attention. I posted the picture on Facebook and instantly people wanted to know where I had seen it.

Once you’ve seen a few interesting insects, a guy like me gets hooked, buys a field guide and wonders what else is out there. I was instantly drawn to the rarer species, since few decent photographs of Dakota skippers existed online (and a few were not even of the correct species). I made a goal to get better photos of them.

The locations of the skippers appear to be a closely guarded secret. These little butterflies can be difficult to find or even see, unless you know where, when and how to look for them. I have found skippers through dumb luck, persistence, researching federal filings, and once, while I was lost. On that occasion, I stumbled upon a Roberts County ranch for sale at auction. I walked around the property, which led me to bid on the land, and the next thing I knew I was a landowner. Later, while again ambling aimlessly around my new prairie, I stumbled upon my first Dakota skippers.

Despite the challenges, my bucket list item of seeing the Dakota skipper has been rewarding. Some of the undisturbed fields on the Coteau des Prairies in northeast South Dakota’s lake country hold the last refuges for this insect devastated by pesticide and the slow and steady loss of virgin prairies. Whether or not you successfully find this butterfly, roaming the prairie in early summer is a grand adventure. At least I have saved my parcel from further damage.

A rare Dakota Skipper found in the Enemy Swim Lake watershed.

These small orangish butterflies live simple lives. Dakota skippers have four basic life stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. During the brief adult period in June and July, females lay up to 250 eggs, one at a time, on the underside of leaves, if enough nectar and moisture is present. Eggs take about 10 days to hatch into small caterpillars. After hatching, larvae build shelters at or below the ground surface and emerge at night to feed on little and big bluestem leaves. This continues until fall when the caterpillars become dormant. They overwinter in shelters at or just below ground level, usually in the base of native little bluestem bunches. The following spring, larvae emerge to continue developing. Pupation takes about 10 days. The males emerge first, about four to five days before the females. Their lives are at most three weeks but usually less and right in the heat of the summer.

There are other butterflies to see besides the Dakota skipper. Another much more impressive resident of these same areas is the regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia), a large, colorful butterfly that was once widespread over the eastern half of the United States. It is now also one of the nation’s many vanishing species of butterflies as its eastern range has now retracted into small, isolated populations and into an area of the historic tallgrass prairies and plains from Kansas to North Dakota. The area around Summit, northeast of Watertown, seems to have more of these colorful butterflies than most. Starting around the last week of June many can also be seen lazily flying over the grasslands for a few weeks.

There has been much concern about this species’ future with a loss of more than 99 percent of the original native tallgrass prairie land cover, decreased sustainable habitat and a generalized loss of its caterpillar foodplant — violets. Although this butterfly is not listed as threatened or endangered, there is much speculation that it will be listed soon.

Not all skippers are Dakota skippers. Most are a different species (South Dakota is home to dozens of skipper species), and many are difficult to identify. The state is also home to at least eight commonly encountered orange colored fritillary species that range from large ones like the regal and the great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele) to ones about a third the size, like the meadow fritillary. Luckily, only the regal fritillary seems to be in immediate peril. Not all butterflies emerge in mid-summer. Some come out in early May and others wait until late summer. Sometimes, when you see them is almost as important as what you see them feeding or displaying on.

One butterfly species has already disappeared in the Upper Midwest. The Poweshiek skipperling has not been seen in South Dakota since 2008 when a few were spotted in Day and Deuel counties. People like me hope they are quietly living in some hidden spot. Sadly, I have never seen this diminutive butterfly that now clings to existence in some isolated meadows in Michigan. I would love to photograph one. Still, there is other life on the prairie and like anything, one needs to get out and see these creatures before they are gone. I did, and I feel I am better for it.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Ten Outdoor Adventures in South Dakota

Where do your outdoor skills and experiences rank in the wild woods, waters and prairies of South Dakota? Do you know the lay of the land? Can you find wild mushrooms? Have you ever seen a gray kneebobber, or the holey rocks of Roberts County? Here are 10 popular activities to help you break the cabin fever of a long winter and enjoy the South Dakota outdoors.

1. BEFRIEND THE MONARCH

Monarch butterflies rank among South Dakota’s most interesting creatures. A butterfly typically hatches here in August, and then as autumn arrives it flies 2,500 miles southward to the Oyamel fir forests where it will hibernate through the winter, often in the same trees as its ancestors. When it reawakens and flies north in the spring it lays eggs, which dramatically shortens its lifespan. Soon it dies. The process repeats itself as the butterflies travel northward. Monarchs that arrive in South Dakota around Mother’s Day are the fourth-generation descendants of those that departed the previous fall.

2. PONDER THE HOLEY ROCKS

One of South Dakota’s great and unresolved mysteries is the”holey rocks” of Roberts County. All of northeast South Dakota is rocky, thanks to glaciers that brought the rocks here 10,000-plus years ago. Some of the biggest boulders have holes about as wide as a quarter. A geologic detective documented 57 such stones in the early years of the 21st century, though there are probably many more. They are not limited to Roberts County. Some have also been discovered in Minnesota and other northern states. One theory is that the stone holes were chiseled as guideposts by Viking explorers who traveled here from Hudson Bay in medieval times, although it requires a rewrite of immigration history.

3. HIKE BUFFALO TRAILS

First, let’s be very clear. We are not suggesting that any of our paying readers should ever intentionally walk near a wild buffalo — unless they can run faster than a horse (because a buffalo can). The big brown galoots have been clocked at 40 mph. Still, it’s a fact that some very cool outdoor trails exist on popular buffalo reserves. Samuel G. Ordway Nature Preserve in northern South Dakota has hiking trails and a buffalo herd, but there’s a fence in between. Wind Cave in the southern Black Hills has 30 miles of hiking trails, and you share the terrain with a herd of 400 bison. Badlands National Park has an”open hike” policy, and that goes for humans and the park’s buffalo so it’s up to the former to be smart. They say if the buffalo notices you then you’re too close … and it may be too late.

4. MUSHROOM HUNTING

South Dakota has many edible mushrooms, but the morel is king. Though the season changes throughout the state, morels are usually found from early April to early May. The best habitat is a moist forest floor, especially near rivers, lakes and swamps. Morels, which only grow in the wild, are difficult to find because they blend into spring’s grassy-brown environment. Look for yellow or tan mushrooms with spongy caps but beware of the false”brain” mushroom. It is toxic. True morels have a honeycomb cap and hollow stems, while false morels are solid. Don’t pull a morel from the ground because it is connected by a hypha to other mushrooms that may soon emerge. Just snip or pinch.

5. STARGAZING

South Dakota has less light pollution than most states, so we should all be amateur stargazers. Badlands National Park is the most enchanting place to watch the stars; park officials offer a Night Sky Program on weekend evenings through the summer. However, rural areas across the state — even in more populated East River — are conducive to seeing the Milky Way and other mysteries of the heavens.

6. GROW A TREE

Statistically-speaking, South Dakota is 4 percent forested. The trouble with statistics is that 99 percent of our approximately 601 million trees are in the Black Hills. Much of our prairie country looks like the aftermath of an immensely successful deforestation program. It’s not that South Dakotans aren’t trying. We once visited a West River ranch and saw a spindly elm tree trying to grow from a crack along the concrete foundation of small barn.”Shouldn’t we pull that out before it widens the crack?” asked our writer. The rancher was horrified.”I’d move the barn before I’d kill that tree!” he exclaimed. Want to do something good for South Dakota’s outdoors? Go plant a tree (or at least leave them alone).

7. PASQUE WATCH

South Dakota’s state flower is the prairie pasque, Pulsatilla patens, a tough and dainty flower that blooms briefly at the first sign of spring. Though it grows throughout the state, many South Dakotans have not seen one in the wild because it blooms so briefly and because it survives best in rugged, natural terrain. The best habitat is north-facing slopes, and the ideal time is just as the snow melts in early April. Finding a patch is a visual treat. For a real challenge, try transplanting a pasque to your garden. Its long roots, developed to survive drought, make it nigh impossible. You’ll have better luck harvesting its seeds, though even that is difficult. It is truly a wild flower, a fitting symbol of springtime in South Dakota.

8. SPOT THE DIPPER

Thirty years ago, a Minnesota birdwatcher alerted South Dakota Magazine that while fishing on Little Spearfish Creek he witnessed a slate-colored bird that could walk under water. He said he reported it at the nearest pool hall, where everyone laughed at his story. They called it a gray kneebobber.”Probably huntin’ for mountain oysters,” laughed one of the locals. Our Minnesota reader later discovered that it was the endangered American dipper, and fortunately the aquatic songbird can still be found in Spearfish and Whitewood creeks in the Northern Hills. Have you seen a dipper and been reluctant to tell anyone for fear of ridicule?

9. TRY SPELUNKING

Even though the Black Hills is home to more than 100 known caves, including several of the world’s longest, spelunking hasn’t caught on like downhill skiing, pheasant hunting or even watching paint dry. Something about the fear of crawling on your belly in the dark through tight canyons shared by bats doesn’t resonate with the outdoors crowd. But add the experience to your bucket list. Wind Cave and Jewel Cave are run by the National Park Service and offer fascinating guided tours, as do several private caves. The names of the passages in Jewel Cave suggest what you’re missing: the Promised Land, the Mind Blower, Boondocks, Wildflower Walk and Spooky Hollow.

10. FIND A FAIRBURN AGATE

South Dakota is heaven for rockhounds, and the Fairburn agate is prized. The state’s official gemstone was first hunted in the moon-like Kern agate beds east of Fairburn in Custer County, but it can also be found in Teepee Canyon west of Custer and elsewhere West River. People have even discovered them mixed with landscape rock and fill material taken from pits near the Cheyenne River. Serious rock hunters have spent days and even weeks searching for Fairburns with no luck, so consider yourself fortunate if you spot even one.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the”South Dakota Outdoor Challenge,” which appeared in the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Winter Potatoes

By Thomas M. Welch and Wayne G. Welch

Silcrete rocks, unique in North America, dot the pastures around Ludlow in Harding County.

When we were growing up on our ranch near Ludlow, we called them flint rocks, though an old timer wittily referred to them as winter potatoes. They are actually siliceous rocks, formed during the Paleocene Epoch (56 to 66 million years ago), numerous on hills and ridges around Ludlow and quite rare on the continent.

Geologists believe that silcrete formed from siliceous waters (rich in silica, a common mineral) in a swampy environment when the region was warm, humid and covered with vegetation. Rocks are made up of minerals and this silcrete is composed of silt sized grains of quartz in a matrix of microcrystalline quartz. Evidence of ancient stems and roots of plants can be found in the rocks; holes and impressions left by that ancient plant material remain.

The very top layer of Flint Butte (a butte northeast of Ludlow known by locals as Flat Top) is an intact solid layer of silcrete and measures 2 to 3 feet thick. It is hard and resistant to erosion. Over the years, softer underlying rock and deposits eroded away, leaving silcrete material and rocks on the surface hills and ridges. The Ludlow area silcrete deposit has been mapped for 30 miles, from the North Cave Hills to Lodgepole. Similar silcrete beds are found in South Africa and Australia.

The Harding County rocks are between 56 million and 66 million years old.

Native Americans used these rocks to make tools and weapons and to anchor tipis. Large rocks can still be seen hanging on fence posts where opportunistic ranchers used barbed wire to attach them to keep posts from pulling out of the ground. We remember building and fixing fences, and like our neighbors, looked for silcrete rocks with natural holes made by ancient roots. The holes are very useful; barbed wire can be run through, which allows for easy attachment. In fact, evidence of old abandoned fence lines in Harding County can be traced to a trail of rocks. Local landmarks such as Tepee Buttes and Flint Butte are covered with silcrete rocks, and they are very numerous among pastures along Highway 85 about a mile north of Ludlow.

Generations of farmers and ranchers have piled the rocks on the edges of fields and cursed them as they took a toll on their farm equipment. We remember the horrific screeching of a disc blade grating against a silcrete rock and watching towed implements jump into the air when striking one. Many oil pans, differentials and steering components have been scarred and punctured by ranchers and hunters driving across pastures where these jagged rocks were hidden in tall grass. It is a sickening sound when a low-slung vehicle encounters one of these sharp-edged rocks. Many a prairie fire has started when mowers and swathers hit silcrete rocks during dry conditions.

Ludlow’s silcrete rocks are unique in North America with an interesting history and use. They are rugged, windswept, and hardened, like generations of inhabitants who walked these lands.

Thomas M. Welch is a retired agricultural educator and Wayne G. Welch is a retired petroleum engineer. Both remain involved with the family ranch near Ludlow.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Goat Watcher

By Bernie Hunhoff

A ragtag herd of mountain goats has chosen to live on the high cliffs of Spearfish Canyon.

Mountain goats have a reputation as escape artists, so it wasn’t a shock when a nanny left Custer State Park in 2016 and showed up about 70 miles away in Spearfish Canyon. The bigger surprise is that there are now 10 goats in the canyon, leaving wildlife officials to wonder what comes next.

Les Heiserman, a retired Spearfish school custodian and inveterate explorer of the canyon, was one of the first persons to observe the nanny.”I first saw her in 2016,” says Heiserman, who visits the canyon daily.”We know she came from Custer State Park because they put a radio collar on her there, but no one had any idea she would travel so far away.”

He has been watching, photographing and advocating for the stray goats ever since. A billy showed up in 2017, and a kid was born the following spring. With so many goats to watch, Heiserman began to name them just so he could keep track. He called the matriarch Granny Nanny. The billy is Bill. Other names include Thimbleberry, Broken Horn, Scooter, Rocky and No. 18 (because he was the first kid, born in 2018).

“I name them for their physical characteristics for the most part,” he says. Thimbleberry was an exception; that name came from seeing the young goat chewing on the fruit of a thimbleberry bush.

The wooly, snow-white creatures are native to the northern Rockies and Canada. Though misidentified as goats by early explorers, they are more closely related to the gazelles and antelopes of Africa.

Despite the namings and his frequent visits, Heiserman keeps a distance from the goats because he worries that too much familiarity with humans could put them at risk.”They don’t mind me, but I know they will shy away from strangers.”

Though the goats generally dwell atop the rocky, rugged limestone cliffs of the 1,000-foot-deep gorge, they sometimes descend to the scenic byway, Highway 14A, that winds 22 miles through the canyon floor.”They love it behind Bridal Veil Falls,” Heiserman says.”They also like to splash in Spearfish Creek and jump over the fallen logs or pose in the stream.”

Tens of thousands of cars, campers and logging trucks travel the byway. Even though the speed limit is 35 miles per hour, Heiserman is concerned that the goats are at risk.”Goats can get salt starved,” he says.”It’s possible that they come down to lick salt off the road, especially in winter. They probably also come down to drink from the creek.”

Because tourists, and even many locals, are not aware that goats are in the vicinity, Heiserman embarked on a campaign to post warning signs. He is adept at climbing the canyon walls, even with a camera around his neck; as it turns out, he’s equally skilled at maneuvering the bureaucracy of government.

Numerous state and federal departments share responsibilities in the canyon, so it was complicated to get everyone to agree on what to do and how to do it. Finally, the state highway department acted on a recommendation from the state Game, Fish and Parks Department — with approval from the U.S. Forest Service — to post the cautionary road signs.

Heiserman says another danger for the goats is inbreeding. Thus far, the entire herd has descended from Granny Nanny and Bill.”They could use a fresh gene pool here,” he says, meaning the introduction of another billy goat.

They face a more immediate threat atop the canyon, not from humans, genetics or vehicles but rather from mountain lions. Chad Lehman, a senior wildlife biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks, says lion predation can affect goat populations.

“We just did a survey and we counted 49 mountain goats in the Custer State Park area, which is down quite a bit,” Lehman says.”The last time we did a survey was in 2018 and then we estimated about 130. We never have an exact count, and we don’t have enough collared goats to know for sure, but there are fewer of them, and we will probably recommend closing the mountain goat hunting season next year.”

Mountain goats are not native to the Black Hills. Their original and natural habitat is Alaska, Canada and the northern Rocky Mountains. They are considered an invasive species in other places. Fifty goats were shot last year in Grand Teton National Park, where officials are hoping for a full extermination. Authorities there think they hinder native flora and fauna, including the bighorn sheep.

Few people know Spearfish Canyon like Les Heiserman. Wildlife officials call him a citizen scientist.

“It’s interesting how two national parks deal with the same critter so differently,” Heiserman says.”In Montana’s Glacier National Park, the goats are revered, almost like the sacred cows of India.”

Lehman and other wildlife officials in South Dakota say they are not concerned about the goats’ environmental impact, and they have nearly a century of experience on the matter. The first goats came to South Dakota in 1924 when Custer State Park, then in its infancy, featured a zoo that provided visitors a close-up view of bear, deer, elk and other species.

Six goats were brought to the zoo from Alberta, Canada, but two escaped the fenced enclosure on their first night in the Hills, and within a few years the entire herd was living on the Black Elk Peak range. Their numbers grew to a high of 400 in the 1940s, and occasionally a billy or nanny has ventured away from the park.

“They need precipitous terrain,” Lehman says.”They love places that are really steep. The granite outcroppings in Custer State Park, the Needles Eye and the Black Elk Wilderness Area all have incredibly steep, granite cliffs. We’ve also had a bunch move into Battle Creek Canyon to the east where it’s basically just a sheer cliff. We had one nanny go to the Boy Scout Camp area on a limestone plateau where she lived for eight years all on her own. We had another in the Bethlehem Cave area for a couple of years, so we’ve got these bizarre stories of how they’ve traveled.”

Lehman says it’s difficult for Game, Fish and Parks staff to monitor the well-being of the wide-ranging goats, so he appreciates”citizen scientists” like Heiserman who monitor and advocate for them.

“I know that Les pretty much lives in the canyon, and he does it just right. You want to be there, yet not too close. What can happen if you habituate them is that they might suddenly inflict their dominance — maybe not on you but on another unsuspecting tourist who gets too close.”

Heiserman does get close enough to document the canyon herd throughout the four seasons. Using a Canon camera with a 100/400 lens, the talented, self-taught photographer captures excellent pictures of the goats and other scenery in the canyon. He posts photos and occasional videos almost daily on his Facebook page, which is open to the public and has a big following. He even published a 2023 goat calendar, which is available through his Facebook page.

Visitors to the canyon are attracted to the goats’ playful nature. Though seemingly tame, wildlife officials caution that they are wild animals and can be dangerous.

Heiserman also shares other tips on enjoying Spearfish Canyon. He has photographed and written about the rare American Dipper as well as osprey, eagles and numerous other species.”The more I know about Spearfish Canyon, the more I realize I don’t know,” he says.”There are subtle changes in the flora and fauna. I recently spotted a peregrine falcon, and then while in the canyon I met an experienced falconer who explained some of the sounds they were making. He thought they were fledglings crying out for food.”

He’s intrigued by the mining and logging activity, the pioneer history and the geology of the canyon. However, the mountain goats get most of his attention. In early summer he saw the kids playing a version of”king of the mountain” on a granite promontory. He’s watched as the nannies teach their young how to make the most of the gifts Mother Nature gave them — their cloven hooves and their horns.

The two-toed hooves expand widely to give them greater balance, and the rough pads of each toe give them a firm grip. That allows them to scale and traverse steep cliffs and walls that scare even mountain lions. But there’s also a technique involved. The goats learn to scratch away loose rocks. They learn to look before they leap. They experiment on how to use speed for horizontal jumps.

Those death-defying theatrics and more show up on Heiserman’s Facebook page. It’s also where followers learned, in April of 2022, that Granny Nanny had died.”When I first saw her, she was a strong-looking goat, but when she passed away, she was worn down to nothing and her teeth were gone.”

That same spring brought the birth of two kids, however, so Granny’s little tribe continues to prosper. Watch for them if you drive through the canyon and follow their growth on Heiserman’s social media postings.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Catch, Move and Release

By Bernie Hunhoff

Steve Nelson and grandson Howie pull a fish from a stock dam before relocating it to a new pond suffering from die-off.

Fish inhabit about half of South Dakota’s 100,000 stock dams and small ponds, thanks in small part to longtime South Dakota promoter Steve Nelson and his grandson, Howie.

Nelson, who lives in Pierre, became a fan of stock dams nearly a half-century ago when he explored Roy Houck’s buffalo ranch, northwest of Fort Pierre in Stanley County. The Missouri River reservoirs hadn’t yet developed as world-class walleye fisheries, so anglers were then more likely to search for small bodies of water to fish.

As a tourism leader, Nelson often worked with the state Game, Fish & Parks Department to help families find a place to cast a line. Today the Glacial Lakes country and the four Missouri reservoirs get most of the attention from tourism officials and anglers, while stock dams are unappreciated treasures.

Nelson continues to do what he can to promote the dams — not by publicizing them, these days, but by catching fish in dams that are overstocked and transferring them to new dams or to ponds that suffered a die-off. Usually, he’s assisted by his grandson Howie, 12, and by some of Howie’s friends.

Three years ago, they learned about a dam that suffered a fish kill because a farmer accidently sprayed an alfalfa field nearby.”We restocked it the next year, and the fish are doing really well,” he says.

Winter kill is the most common threat to fish life in smaller ponds.”Ideally a pond would be 15 to 20 feet deep, but if they get under about nine feet and you have a hard winter with a lot of snow cover on the ice then you don’t get photosynthesis and the water can become oxygen-dead,” he explains. When that happens, Nelson and his young associates wait until the water level is once again high enough to sustain aquatic life and then they introduce more fish.

Walleye fishing can be complicated and tedious for some youth, while pond fishing is exhilarating.”Howie and his friends just like to catch fish,” he says.”They don’t always care what kind of fish or how big. They want some action. One day we caught 50 bluegills in an hour. As soon as the bobber hit the water it was going down.”

Most of South Dakota’s stock dams are on private land, so permission may be required to fish them. However, Nelson says South Dakota has five million acres of public land with hundreds of ponds — including three national grasslands in West River country and state-owned lands scattered throughout the state. Some of the public waters now have boat docks, restrooms and fishing piers.

Most small ponds and dams can be fished from shore, although Nelson says a small boat may be helpful in late summer when the water warms and fish concentrate in the deepest part of the pond, which is usually the center.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Elk Magic

By Katie Hunhoff

Elk bugle during the fall as part of the mating season ritual.

We sat in the truck and waited for the October sun to set over the gentle hills of Wind Cave National Park. A giant buffalo sauntered just a few yards away. Through the windshield we saw coyotes hunting in the distance. We heard geese calling and coyotes howling. Not a bad opening act, I thought, for what we had come to hear — the distinct and haunting bugling of elk.

I had never heard an elk bugle, and I had avoided the temptation to search for the sound on the internet before our outing. But I knew those were the words often used to describe the sound: distinct and haunting and also ethereal, eerie, powerful.

We waited for sunset because the first rule for hearing elk is that timing is everything. Elk only bugle during their mating season, primarily in September and October, and most often from sunset to sunrise.

I learned this from my guide that evening — Dan Tribby, a lifelong elk and nature lover. Tribby’s day job is the manager of Prairie Edge and Trading Post, a Native American goods and art store in downtown Rapid City.

Tribby said Wind Cave is a good place to start for beginners because there is no hunting in the park. Consequently, the elk are less likely to be wary of the sounds of people and vehicles. We met at the visitor’s center and drove a short distance to the parking lot near Cold Brook Canyon Trail on Highway 385.

Along the way, Tribby educated me on elk behavior. Bull elks, he said, build harems of 15 to 20 cows, and then fight off other bulls. That’s mostly what the bugling is about every fall. They are signaling to other bulls in the area that they are with their cows; be scarce or beware. However bulls without a harem may also be bugling. They are assessing the lay of the land, and probably hoping to steal some cows.

Elk once roamed as far east as mountains in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Their original name is wapiti, a Shawnee word meaning”white rump.” English settlers called them elk, the term for a European moose. Hunters greatly diminished American elk numbers from 10 million to under 100,000, and by 1900 South Dakota’s elk population was near extinction. Rocky Mountain elk were captured and used to repopulate herds in South Dakota between 1911 and 1916, and by 1928 herd numbers had grown to around 1,000. Today, 6,000 to 8,000 elk inhabit the Black Hills National Forest, Custer State Park and surrounding prairies. They can also be found on grasslands in Butte, Bennett and Gregory counties and on the Lower Brule Indian Reservation.

As we waited for the sun to go down, Tribby reminisced on his first experience with elk.”They are just so magnificent,” he said.”I was in high school when I saw my first wild elk in the Black Hills and I have loved them ever since. They were such a rarity, like mountain lions back in those days. And the more you saw them the more you fell in love with them.”

Tribby had an archery license to hunt elk in 1997 and a rifle license in 2007. He describes the time of hunting elk with his bow tag as among the most joyful 30 days of his life.”They are so big, the size of a horse. I can’t understand how a horse with antlers can sneak up on you but they do. I was hunting outside of Sturgis one day and I turned around and there was a monstrous bull just 50 feet away. It was magical. I could look through the spruce tree and could see his eyes and he was looking at me through the spruce tree.”

I saw a pattern. People who have heard the bugling use the same words; majestic, magnificent, charismatic and magical. While I don’t think you can become addicted to a sound, they all want to repeat the experience.

The sun was setting, so Tribby and I began to walk to the top of the nearest ridge because the bugling carries farther at higher elevations. Meanwhile, Tribby continued to tell me of his elk adventures.”There have been so many good times calling them in for people,” he said.”It changes their life, you know. I still love going for rides with my mom, whether we see them or not. We call them from the car. She’s 90 now and won’t go trudging through the woods looking for them, but she sure likes to hear them bugle.”

Dan Tribby, manager of Prairie Edge Trading Post in Rapid City, has been enamored with elk since he first saw one in the Black Hills as a teenager. He still enjoys trips into the wild each fall to hear them bugle.

That night we listened atop the ridge in Wind Cave for about an hour. Coyotes continued to call. It did feel magical — merely being in the mountains after dark was a thrill. But we didn’t hear any elk. Instead of being disappointed, I was intrigued and promised myself more opportunities.

A few months later I called Chad Lehman, senior wildlife biologist at Custer State Park to ask about bugling in the park. Lehman, too, it turns out, is an elk enthusiast. He has hunted elk for 22 years throughout the West. He had some additional tips for first timers hoping to hear bugling.

“Bulls will start bugling at the end of August but it is rare to hear,” Lehman said. The rut picks up around Sept. 20-25, but the best bet is Sept. 20-30.”That’s when cows are being bred. So you could hear a bugle every minute during that time, but in early September maybe only one or two bugles an hour.”

Lehman recommends keeping a safe distance from elk, but he doesn’t see a problem with elk safety in South Dakota.”In Estes Park some elk have lost the element of being scared because they aren’t hunted. They have attacked cars and people. But fortunately we don’t have a population habituated to people,” he said.

I asked him why people are so intrigued by elk. He chuckled and understood the question.”I look at it as people in general love being outdoors and studying the behavior of animals. That’s anyone from someone who grew up in the country or someone from the city. There’s an innate characteristic in people who love being outside. And with elk, when you’re talking about the peak of rutting season, you can see and hear things in nature that are unmatched.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson philosophized in his essay”Nature” that experiencing the outdoors is the closest one can get to God, and to truly be at one with nature and God is to not only observe it but also be absorbed by it.”Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air — and uplifted into infinite spaces — all mean egotism vanishes,” he wrote.”I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Tribby, Lehman and other elk-lovers I’ve met all seem to share an appreciation for the wonder and majesty as described by Emerson. At the end of our night at Wind Cave, Tribby told me about a time when he was walking in the forest and happened to see an elk tooth out of the corner of his eye.”Just to walk around and see an elk ivory is unheard of,” he said.”Every elk only has two ivories.” Tribby picked it up and resumed his hike.

When he returned to Prairie Edge, he overheard two co-workers who were making an elk tooth dress for their daughter. They needed one more elk ivory to complete it, and they wondered where they might find one. Tribby happily gave his to them.”The spirits were working for us that day,” he said.

Magical.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Reaching New Heights

By John Andrews

Paul Horsted (left) and surveyors Jerry Penry and Kurt Luebke conducted what they believe to be the first accurate survey of Black Elk Peak in nearly 120 years.

Standing inside the stone fire lookout tower atop Black Elk Peak on a crystal-clear day, a person can see hundreds of miles across South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Montana. You feel like a king surveying his realm. You’re standing on the highest point in South Dakota, the spot long touted as the tallest between the North American Rocky Mountains and the European Pyrenees along the border of France and Spain. If you have a map, it will say you are 7,242 feet above sea level.

But that map is wrong, according to surveyors Jerry Penry and Kurt Luebke, who in the fall of 2016 took a team of volunteers and conducted perhaps the first accurate survey of the historic mountain in more than 100 years. Over the course of two days, using equipment and methods that didn’t exist when the United States Geological Survey last triangulated a handful of high points in the Black Hills in 1897, the team concluded that Black Elk stands 7,231 feet high, 11 feet shorter than the widely known and accepted elevation.

Black Elk’s measurements have differed since man first tried to assign it a number in the late 19th century. Sometimes the discrepancies came in hundreds of feet. Even modern estimates differ based on the particular points considered. The highest natural rock? The top of the stone lookout tower? The tip of its lightning rod? Some other prominent point?

Penry chose to conduct his survey to the highest natural rock, so with equipment in hand on the morning of September 15, 2016, he and the team began their ascent.

*****

The birth of Black Elk Peak began more than 1.8 billion years ago, when a vast pool of molten magma cooled and solidified below the earth’s crust. It rose with the Black Hills Uplift, which began about 62 million years ago. By around 30 million years ago the uplift had ceased, and erosion left much the same landscape that we enjoy today.

The first structure placed atop Black Elk Peak was little more than a small table placed there in 1911 to spot wildfires. The Forest Service later built this wooden lookout, which has since been replaced by the stone tower that we know today. Photo by Charles D’Emery/Paul Horsted Collection

The first white men to try to ascertain its height were members of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 1874 expedition into the Black Hills. Custer and his 7th Cavalry had been sent from Fort Abraham Lincoln near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, to scout potential fort locations and to investigate rumors of gold in the Hills, which remained within the Great Sioux Reservation under terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

Having established camp at the present townsite of Custer, a small party escorted by a company of cavalry left on the morning of July 31 to explore what the soldiers already knew — and what was already appearing on crude maps of the region — as Harney Peak. Lt. Gouverneur K. Warren had bestowed that name upon the mountain in honor of his commanding officer Gen. William Harney, known then for his battles against Plains Indians including the Grattan Massacre in 1854 and the Battle of Ash Hollow in 1855, in which Harney’s troops destroyed the Brule leader Little Thunder’s village along Blue Water Creek in western Nebraska, killing about half of his band’s 250 members. It was precisely because of his reputation for violence against Native Americans that tribes in 2016 successfully lobbied the U.S. Board of Geographic Names to rechristen it Black Elk Peak in honor of the Lakota holy man Black Elk (see sidebar).

Custer was accompanied by Newton Winchell (geologist), Aris Donaldson (botanist and correspondent for the St. Paul Pioneer Press), chief engineer William Ludlow and Ludlow’s assistant William Wood. After an 8- or 9-mile horseback ride along Laughing Water Creek and around Buckhorn Mountain, the party left their animals to scramble up the final 200 feet of Harney’s granite.”Wedging ourselves into the clefts, and pushing ourselves up after the fashion of chimney sweeps, clinging to projecting points and straddling over ridges, we at last reached the top,” Donaldson reported in the Pioneer Press.

It was then, however, that someone noticed an even higher point, and a higher point after that. The party scaled until finally they could climb no more. They had reached perpendicular granite walls that stood nearly 40 feet tall and could not be negotiated without ropes or ladders.”Prof. Winchell made the attempt and partially succeeded, but a loose rock just above him made it dangerous to climb higher,” Donaldson wrote.”He stood above us all.”

Ludlow carried a barometer, which he used to calculate the peak’s elevation at 9,700 feet. The following year, in 1875, the U.S. Geological Survey dispatched the Newton-Jenney Party to create a map of the Black Hills. Astronomer Horace Tuttle took measurements using a Green’s mercury barometer, considered among the most accurate tools available in the late 19th century for calculating elevations. Tuttle compared his readings on the mountaintop to another barometer inside the Union Pacific Railroad station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where a precise elevation was previously established. By comparing the differences in readings, Tuttle concluded Harney Peak stood 7,369 feet high. Noting the incredible disparity between his reading and Ludlow’s from the previous year, Tuttle measured again, this time arriving at 7,368 feet.

Rock highlighted in green was removed during construction of the stone tower in the 1930s. Photo by Paul Horsted

It’s worth noting that the original”true summit” of Black Elk Peak may not be the location of today’s fire tower. Valentine McGillycuddy, who worked closely with Tuttle as topographer on the Newton-Jenney Expedition and lived a long and influential life that shaped Rapid City and the Black Hills, selected what he considered the highest point on a spire about 100 yards south of today’s widely recognized and well-traveled summit.”Setting up and leveling it [the transit], we [McGillycuddy and Tuttle] swung the telescope to every point of the compass and Harney Peak — the rock our instrument was on — topped every other bit of granite, near or far!” McGillycuddy later reminisced.”It is possible that the Forest Service has selected a more accessible peak to designate as their Harney Peak station, for not many people have succeeded in making that ascent of the original and only Harney.”

The subsequent years were beset with confusion about the mountain’s true elevation. In 1877 the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories published its latest edition of Lists of Elevations. Harney Peak was included at Ludlow’s 9,700 feet. Results from the Newton-Jenney Expedition weren’t published until 1880. Other travel publications indicated the elevation at anywhere from 7,440 to 7,700 feet. Tuttle’s result didn’t appear in print until the U.S. Geological Survey’s bulletin of 1891.

Then in 1893 the USGS created the Black Hills’ first triangulation network in which points were placed on selected peaks, including Harney. That was followed in 1896 by creation of the Deadwood Datum. Officials determined that a benchmark at the Deadwood depot of the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad offered the most accurate sea level elevation in the Hills. From that point, hundreds more permanent benchmarks were established. A triangulation station was placed on Bear Mountain, just over 10 miles west of Harney Peak, and another on Crow’s Nest Peak, 16 miles northwest. Penry believes elevations were transferred from nearby benchmarks to these triangulation stations since they were easily accessible. The point that had been placed atop Harney in 1893 was easily sighted from both of those locations, which is most likely how crews arrived at a new elevation of 7,240 feet. The intervening years have added another 2 feet, leading to the 7,242 feet that appears on most maps, websites and other documentation.

*****

Paul Horsted has admired the view from atop Black Elk Peak dozens of times. The promontory and its recognizable fire tower have featured prominently in his photography since he and his wife Camille Riner moved to Custer 22 years ago.

Horsted found his niche in exploring 19th and early 20th century photo sites of the Black Hills and other spots around South Dakota and re-photographing them. His book Exploring with Custer, written with Ernest Grafe in 2002, follows the trail of that 1874 expedition and includes images taken by the expedition’s photographer, W.H. Illingworth, paired with Horsted’s modern-day versions.

Horsted helped take measurements atop McGillycuddy Peak. Photo by Daryl Stisser

Horsted became particularly interested with the geography around the summit of Black Elk Peak and what he came to think of as the nearby McGillycuddy Peak while studying photographs taken during the Newton-Jenney Expedition of 1875, including one image which portrays Tuttle and McGillycuddy surveying from this alternate summit. Noticing changes in the rock over the years, he learned of the differing elevations and contacted Jerry Penry, hoping to find a definitive answer.

Penry, based in Lincoln, Nebraska, has been a surveyor since 1984. Licensed in Nebraska and South Dakota, most of his work involves determining legal boundaries and property lines. But surveying is also a hobby. He began traveling to the Black Hills in 2010 to meet friend and fellow surveyor Kurt Luebke, of Missoula, Montana. Together, they spend vacations searching the Hills for old benchmarks and other monuments from the early days of surveying.

Penry was immediately intrigued by the elevation mystery.”I couldn’t come up with a definitive reason that that elevation existed on Black Elk Peak, so I really got curious,” Penry says.”There is no documentation that says someone actually had measured up to that peak to determine that elevation (7,242), but it did appear on some of the earliest maps of the Black Hills that the U.S. Geological Survey produced in late 1890s. As near as I could tell, they did it by triangulation from different points placed on mountain peaks. By turning angles both horizontally and vertically you can determine distances from point to point and also the elevation.”

So on a breezy but beautiful September morning, Penry, Luebke and Horsted ascended Black Elk Peak hoping to come away with a true elevation. They were accompanied by Daryl and Cheryl Stisser of the Sylvan Rocks Climbing School and Horsted’s wife and daughter, Camille and Anna Marie Riner.

The job combined using historic benchmarks with modern technology. The crew sought out two geodetic marks placed in 1934 along the present-day Mickelson Trail. Utilizing those, they created a new benchmark in an open area where global positioning devices could accurately be used. Then they headed up the mountain. Over two days — using levels, lasers, prism rods, advanced GPS transmitters and receivers and a lot of trigonometry — they came away with what Penry believes to be”the most precise survey ever done on that peak, I’m sure.”

The results were: 7,231.32 feet to the highest natural rock on Black Elk Peak near the stone lookout tower; 7,257.20 feet to the top of the tower; and 7,262.30 feet to the tip of the lightning rod mounted on the tower’s roof.

Inside the lookout tower, surveyor Jerry Penry (with level instrument) and Paul Horsted transferred the precise elevation from an outside point. That helped determine the floor and roof elevations. Photo by Paul Horsted

They also measured 7,229.41 feet to the highest natural rock remaining on McGillycuddy Peak. Studying 1875 photos of that area, Horsted says a block of granite about the size of a small car once jutted from the top but has since disappeared.”I think McGillycuddy was correct that it was a slightly taller area at the top of the peak,” he says.”Most people hiking by will wonder what the big fuss is about, but I want to give McGillycuddy his due as a topographer. He took this really seriously, and I do believe that he was correct in his view that he was on the actual summit of what he knew as Harney Peak.”

An interesting postscript to the measurements is that they will all change once again within a year. The 2016 elevations were calculated using the North American Vertical Datum of 1988, a leveling network that spans the continent. When the National Geodetic Survey updates the datum to rely solely on information gleaned from satellites in 2022, all elevations in the Black Hills will drop 2 feet, shrinking Black Elk Peak to 7,229 feet.

*****

Though the survey was completed nearly five years ago, maps today are still likely to read 7,242. That’s because both Penry and Horsted recognize that any official change could be a long and arduous process.”I didn’t really pursue it through a lot of channels, but it should be known,” Penry says.”I spoke to a few people in the Forest Service. It’s on so many documents, and it’s just been copied from one place to another, so I’m not real confident that it would ever be changed.”

ìIt’s just been fascinating and fun to know that the elevation has probably been incorrectly stated for more than 100 years,” Horsted says.”I’ll leave it to Jerry and Kurt to try to convince the powers that be that they need to update the maps, but that’s going to take years. It’s not unlike the name change. It’s difficult to erase something that’s been written down hundreds of times. So it’s going to be a while.”

Nevertheless, South Dakotans can still delight in a hike to South Dakota’s highest spot. The air remains clean and refreshing and the view just as inspiring — even if you’re only 7,231 feet high.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Where the Pronghorns Play

By Paul Higbee

Photography by Dick Kettlewell

Pronghorns are swift, hitting speeds between 60 and 65 mph when they run across the West River prairie.

PRONGHORNS, THE SLEEK and beautiful creatures that have the run of big sections of South Dakota prairie, are the fastest land animals in North America. They can hit speeds of 60 to 65 miles per hour.

Many of us learned that fact in elementary school before we knew the animal’s true name. For generations, Americans called pronghorns antelopes — a misnomer hard to overcome partly because of Daniel Kelley and Brewster Higley’s classic song,”Home on the Range.” It describes a Great Plains landscape where”the deer and the antelope play.” In fact, our South Dakota animals are not only geographically distant from true African savannah antelope, but completely distinct biologically. (No South Dakotan, though, will admonish you for using the term”antelope.”)

Biology has endowed pronghorns not only with strength and agility that translates to their terrific speed, but arguably the most remarkable eyes of any North American mammal. Their eyeballs are the size of an elephant’s. A pronghorn’s vision can be compared to ours when we’re equipped with a set of 8 x 50 binoculars.

Hot Springs wildlife photographer Dick Kettlewell has witnessed how that keen eyesight can prompt group action.”Sometimes I’ll be photographing a group of them and I’ll notice them stop and look at something in the distance,” he says.”And so I’ll look and look, but when I finally see what they see, they’ve run into the next county.”

Pronghorn eyes, adds Kettlewell, bulge almost like fish eyes and can see wide degrees of landscape. And there’s more.

Pronghorn does are skilled at hiding their babies and defending them from natural predators such as coyotes.

“They have those wonderful eyelashes,” Kettlewell says.”Especially the fawns. I call them Elizabeth Taylor eyelashes.”

Unseen is a big brain. Pronghorns are smart and able to learn. For example, conventional wisdom in the West long held that pronghorns couldn’t jump barbed wire fences. But Kettlewell thinks more are leaping fences in recent years, because the species has learned how.

“They probably prefer crawling under fences because their legs are made for running, not jumping,” Kettlewell says.”They could always jump over creek beds as they ran, but fences were something new when they appeared just 130 or 140 years ago in the West. That’s a very short time when you’re looking at the evolution of a species.”

The evolution of the pronghorn over the past few thousand years is an incredible story, one that made them perhaps the quintessential plains animal (only bison aficionados are likely to challenge that). Species of Asian goats made their way across the Ice Age land bridge and migrated as far south as the Florida peninsula, Mexico and maybe even Central America. But they apparently thrived best on the Great Plains, and it was from here the modern pronghorn emerged.

They made their way into the mythology of plains Native peoples, from creation stories to accounts of other creatures foolish enough to challenge them to races. According to those myths, wagering on those races is how pronghorns acquired such a vast amount of prairie grasslands. Natives also hunted pronghorns, sometimes shooting them and sometimes driving them over steep embankments on horseback.

Despite that history, Lewis and Clark had no knowledge of pronghorns until their journey into the West in 1804. They first spotted them along the Missouri River, somewhere downstream from where the Niobrara flows into it, south of present-day South Dakota. Members of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, as they navigated the Missouri up through the middle of our future state, saw big herds on both sides of the river. They managed to shoot some and prepared two for mounting so that President Thomas Jefferson could take a look.

“Lewis and Clark called them antelope because they knew of the animals in Africa,” Kettlewell says.”You can’t blame them. The colors are similar.”

That was 217 years ago. Outsiders passing through South Dakota today are also often baffled by pronghorns.”They’re not especially well known outside our region,” Kettlewell says.”Travelers often think they’re some kind of deer.”

A pronghorn’s eyes are as big as an elephants and accentuated by “Elizabeth Taylor” lashes.

Few people have done more than Dick Kettlewell to help the public learn about this under-the-radar animal. He paraphrases Henry David Thoreau in describing himself as”a self-appointed inspector” of Great Plains and Black Hills wildlife. Kettlewell’s pronghorn photography (as well as photos of most every other Northern Plains wild creature) have been featured in books, magazines and online resources. He takes photos by knowing what their behavior is likely to be in any given season, and then blending into the habitat with them.

He grew up living on three continents. When it was time for college, he selected a school near the center of the North American continent — Nebraska’s Chadron State College. A few weeks into his freshman year in 1964, Kettlewell and some buddies drove an hour north and, he recalls,”that was the first time I saw the Black Hills, elk and pronghorns. I kind of put the Black Hills in my pocket that trip, thinking I might want to come back there to live.”

First, though, Kettlewell worked as a photojournalist in Texas and New Mexico. He learned techniques for capturing speedsters — human athletes — on film as he covered sports. In 1995 he moved north and worked a dozen years for the Rapid City Journal. His”Spring Creek Chronicles,” a series of outdoor photo essays for the Journal, won both fans and awards.

Kettlewell loved all Black Hills prairie landscapes and wildlife but found pronghorns hard to top.”I like to show the motion in their legs,” he says,”especially when doing pan shots — moving the camera with them as they run — so that the background is blurred.”

Photographing those big-eyed fawns led Kettlewell to learn something else about pronghorn biology. Does, except for their first pregnancies, usually produce multiple births. That’s important because for all their speed, pronghorns — especially fawns — get picked off by natural enemies.

“Coyotes come after fawns, and I’ve seen eagles do the same,” says Bob Speirs, a Spearfish High School language arts teacher who also works as a hunting guide.”Fawns are smaller than jackrabbits, and eagles can pick them up.”

That’s not to suggest pronghorns aren’t tough.”Unbelievably tough,” Speirs adds.”I see them on windswept hillsides in winter because that’s where they’ll get to the grass.” And in mid-September, mating season, bucks are tough on one another.”That’s when they act like goats, ramming each other. Sometimes bucks are injured brutally,” Speirs says.

But nothing brutalizes entire herds like bitter winters that seem to come once or twice a decade: mid-1980s, late-1990s, three in a row from 2008 to 2011, and Winter Storm Atlas in 2013. Come spring, South Dakotans look across the emptied plains and wonder if pronghorns will bounce back, but they always do, and usually surprisingly fast.

Photographer Dick Kettlewell collected images of pronghorns in all seasons for his book A Pronghorn Year, released in 2014.

Unregulated hunting and disease in the West nearly drove pronghorns to extinction in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1911, the South Dakota legislature outlawed harvesting pronghorns, and shortly after, early wildlife management efforts (including a Harding County preserve) met success in bringing the animals back. By the mid-1920s, about 700 grazed the state’s grasslands, mostly west of the Missouri. Devastating as the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s were for people, they proved beneficial to pronghorns in the long run because they drove lots of farmers off the land and opened up wider habitats. The 1930s, in fact, saw state-regulated hunting put to work to maintain healthy herds.

Today nearly 50,000 pronghorns live in South Dakota, according to state Game, Fish and Parks pronghorn management documents. They’re mostly found in the northwest, on tribal lands and all along the South Dakota-Wyoming border. Open, rolling and untilled lands make prime habitats.

While out-of-state travelers in general may not be attuned to pronghorns, that’s not the case with those inclined to hunt. They love the challenge of quick, small targets (an adult buck may weigh only 120 pounds). Speirs is noticing increasing popularity in archery pronghorn hunting.

There is a payoff. Pronghorn meat, says Speirs, is sweet and tender. Many people who say they don’t like wild game make an exception for pronghorn.

Kettlewell, meanwhile, still picks up new knowledge about the species while in the field with his camera.”I think most of us have the impression that mother pronghorns protect their young by leading predators away from their prey,” he says.”But I have also watched a pronghorn doe defend, protect and kick a coyote to keep fawns safe.”

One day Kettlewell dropped into a ravine where a fawn lay hidden in deep grass. A coyote descended from the other side of the ravine. Suddenly, Kettlewell saw the mother appear and”sprint right into the coyote and roll him over. Then she kicked him with her front legs and he went running. This doe was right behind him, biting, and she chased him out of the ravine. She was gone for 20 or 30 seconds and came back to the fawn.”

The three- or four-week-old fawn stood, oblivious to its close call, and followed its mother out of the ravine. The doe had won the battle, ensuring survival for the youngest of a species that has learned to thrive on the plains of South Dakota.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Pearls on the Prairie

Story by John Andrews

Photography by Christian Begeman

Prairie Smoke at Jacobson Fen in Deuel County.

Christian Begeman was driving the backroads of Deuel County near the Crystal Springs Rodeo grounds when he stumbled upon Jacobsen Fen Preserve, 160 acres managed by the Nature Conservancy that includes 10 calcareous fens. Unique wetlands such as these, which often support plants that cannot be found anywhere else in South Dakota, are sprinkled primarily throughout the Glacial Lakes on the eastern slope of the Prairie Coteau. They can be part of large complexes like Jacobsen Fen or the nearby 7-Mile Fen (also managed by the Nature Conservancy), or small enough that a farmer may walk past for years and not realize the treasures blossoming on his land.

“It’s not something you’re going to see from 100 yards away. You usually have to be standing on it to be able to see these plants,” says Dave Ode, a retired Game, Fish and Parks Department botanist.”The prairie is a place where you have to look closely, because there’s more there than might meet the eye.”

Fens are distinguishable from other wetlands because they contain large amounts of peat. Fed by underground springs, the cold, oxygen-poor water preserves organic material — usually grasses, sedges, rushes and root material — and creates spongy peat deposits. Those saturated pools of peat sit atop a cone made from a material called tufa, a hard, calcium-rich layer that forms over years of groundwater discharge.”Often times you’ll have a floating mat of vegetation that you can walk on,” Ode says.”It’s like a waterbed.”

Great Plains Ladies’ Tresses, 7-Mile Fen, Deuel County.

Thanks to the work of glaciers thousands of years ago, the Prairie Coteau is the perfect environment for fens and their rare plant and animal life. De Alton Saunders, a botany professor at the State Agricultural College in Brookings, was among the first scientists to document the flora in what he called”cold spring bogs” in the summers of 1896 and 1897. Among the plants he recorded were Northern stitchwort, slender cotton grass, necklace sedge and the small fringed gentian, a biennial that produces tiny blue flowers in late August and September.

The fringed gentian wasn’t documented again for another 80 years, when Ode and his colleagues began to revisit the fens in search of those rare plants. A Natural Areas Registry was created, and in 1985 the first site to be included was Hamann’s Fen, about 900 square feet in the middle of Alvin Hamann’s pasture west of Clear Lake.”He was just fascinated by the plants that occurred on that fen,” Ode said of Hamann, who died at age 102 in 2019.”He’d lived on that land all of his life. He’d ridden by it and driven above it, but never stopped to look at the plants on that little particular spot.”

Today there are around 30 documented fens in South Dakota, although Joe Blastick, Prairie Coteau Land Steward with the Nature Conservancy, believes there are surely others on private land that have not yet been discovered.”These are among the most rare and fragile wetlands we have in the world, and we still don’t know where all of them are,” Blastick says.”It’s really challenging because generally landowners know they have something special, they just don’t know it’s a fen because they’ve never really learned about them.”

While South Dakota’s fens are predominantly in the northeast, there are two notable sites in other parts of the state. The Minnechaduza Fen straddles the South Dakota/Nebraska border where the Nebraska Sandhills creep onto the Rosebud Reservation along Minnechaduza Creek, a tributary of the Niobrara River. In the 1960s, scientists attempted to date the fen by taking core samples through nearly 4 meters of accumulated peat. The preserved seeds, pollen and other organic matter that they recovered were more than 12,000 years old.”That fen predates the return of the grasslands to the Great Plains,” Ode says.”Western South Dakota had all of these patches of boreal forest. They found spruce cones, aspen seeds and pollen, and lots of rushes from the tail end of the glaciers in the bottom zone of this peat.”

Another interesting place is McIntosh Fen in the Castle Creek Valley northwest of Deerfield in the Black Hills. Its namesake, Arthur McIntosh, was a professor at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City and the first person to fully document the plants of the Black Hills. (Minor documentation had been done in the past, including by a botanist on Lt. Col. George Custer’s 1874 expedition to the Black Hills. His soldiers camped in Castle Creek Valley, and in one of William Illingworth’s iconic photos of the expedition, McIntosh Fen is visible in the background.)

Lesser Fringed Gentian, Roberts County.

Among the plants that McIntosh discovered in 1924 were several species of willow that grow hardly anywhere else in South Dakota. Two decades later Sven Froiland, longtime biology professor at Augustana University in Sioux Falls and the namesake of its Froiland Science Complex, was studying willows of the Black Hills. He found McIntosh’s notes and attempted to relocate the fen. He followed the professor’s written directions exactly — 3 miles upstream from Deerfield — but never found McIntosh Fen.

In the 1980s, as Ode and others worked on their fen redocumentation, they encountered the same problem. Then Ode discovered that when the government dammed Castle Creek to create Deerfield Lake, the townsite was moved in 1946.”So you basically have to subtract the distance they moved Deerfield,” he says.”If you go half a mile upstream, voila, there’s McIntosh Fen, the same site he had described.”

Fens are magical places for botanists, nature lovers and photographers like Begeman, who was already enamored with the beauty of the northeast.”The rolling hills and unplowed pastures remind me of my childhood home in rural Dewey and Ziebach counties,” Begeman says.”This landscape is a haven for natural beauty tucked away amongst the hills. When I learned that there were small fens sprinkled throughout that offered even more diversity and rarities, the area became even more of a treasure.”

He’s returned for several summers to photograph the small white lady’s slipper, fiery orange wood lilies, threatened Monarch butterflies and regal fritillaries.”The elegant blue of the lesser fringed gentian and delicate white petals of the grass of parnassus are tiny, but gorgeous late summer residents of our calcareous fens. For a photographer with a macro lens, this kind of delicate beauty is worth getting my feet and knees wet,” he says.”In a world where true wilderness and unique beauty in natural habitat is hard to find, it’s great to know that areas of nearly untouched prairie and wetland abundance still exist.”

You can find them, too — if you know where to look.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Scars from the Sky

By Paul Higbee

A lightning strike beyond the Badlands. Photo by Greg Latza.

As a little girl, my great-grandmother found lightning terrifying. She saw plenty of it growing up in the Mississippi River Valley, but not the bolt that seemingly came from nowhere and slammed her to the ground.

She was 12 then and survived, obviously. I wouldn’t be here to tell her story if she hadn’t. Strangely, this girl with a lightning phobia never feared it again after that day and was, in fact, somewhat lackadaisical about it.

On second thought, maybe that isn’t so strange, because encounters with lightning often change people. I heard my great-grandmother’s descendants speculate that perhaps she had a near-death experience that changed her view of life. Or maybe she took the old adage about lightning never striking twice literally. A psychologist friend of mine theorized that before being struck, she considered lightning certain death. Understanding that it wasn’t necessarily so was enough to dissolve her phobia.

Between 75 and 80 percent of people struck by lightning survive, as does the majority of livestock, though that’s harder to measure. An examination of our forests proves that thousands of trees live through

lightning, too — some multiple times across decades. Gary Say, a retired Forest Service forester who fought wildfires across the west for 30 years, says the percentage of trees struck by lightning that burst into flame is only about 1 percent.

The lightning I’ve known in South Dakota is every bit as intimidating (or impressive, depending on your point of view) as the strikes my great-grandmother saw generated by Mississippi Valley summer storms. Florida is the number one state for lightning strikes, but next are the states comprising Tornado Alley, right up the center of the nation. On open South Dakota prairies, you can watch as a lightning storm brews miles away. You can monitor whether it’s coming toward you or moving a different direction and calculate its distance by counting seconds between a flash and the sound of thunder reaching your ears.

One night in Stanley County, I watched two big storms collide. Wind forced me to pull my car off the road far from any shelter, and I sat in awe watching lightning hit the ground 360 degrees around me, more strikes per minute than I could count. How close? The storm wasn’t exactly on top of me, but it proved pointless to count the seconds whenever a big bolt hit. After half an hour the show was suddenly over and a calm, cool night followed.

It’s no wonder, I thought, that Crazy Horse — who knew these prairies and their seasonal moods well — saw lightning as symbolizing his own mighty power.

Long vertical splits are telltale signs that a tree has been struck by lightning.

The most terrifying South Dakota lightning is experienced in a boat on the Missouri River or a big lake in the northeast. The most consistently spectacular, it can be argued, is found in the Black Hills. Thunderstorm researcher Tom Warner, a native Californian who made Rapid City his observation base after Air Force service, says that the Hills see more positive cloud-to-ground lightning than most places, typically producing strikes of longer duration and carrying greater charge. Thunder that reverberates down canyons may sound as if lightning is bouncing off granite pinnacles and limestone cliffs, but Warner notes that those geological features are only rarely hit. Man-made targets like fire lookouts, tall buildings and cell phone and wind turbine towers trigger more lightning than rocky peaks.

The Black Hills can offer a false sense of security. If you’re in a canyon and the sky above is blue, you’ll never guess it’s black and menacing just beyond the rim and moving your way. And when lightning develops in a canyon, it’s easy to think,”How could it possibly find me under the cliffs and hidden among trees?”

That’s what Black Hills people asked about Gage McSpadden, struck and killed while playing disc golf on a course tucked into the mouth of Spearfish Canyon in July of 2015. A well-known cross-country and track athlete at Black Hills State University, his death generated lots of press and was listed as one of 28 lightning fatalities in the United States that year. Press accounts reminded readers that not all lightning strikes are direct. It seemed the bolt that killed McSpadden (and seriously injured a companion) first hit a metal disc cage and expanded outward as the men approached.

Ken Sargent, originally from Martin and now living in Denver, doesn’t know whether he took a direct or indirect hit near Mount Rushmore on July 20, 1985. He can’t recall the strike itself and has relied on the account of a friend who was present in recreating the scene. She waited in a car as Sargent completed a non-technical rock climb. He descended the granite and was cooling off before getting into the car. The day was overcast but there had been no thunder or lightning.

“I was fooling around and I picked up a pine cone, pretended it was a grenade and that I was pulling the pin,” Sargent says.”Then I threw it at the car.”

Boom!

Lightning hit,”but my friend thought I was still fooling,” Sargent continues.”I got to the car and was saying, ‘My bones ache! My God, they ache so much!'”

He climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and promptly drove into the ditch. At that point the friend took over; there’s no doubt she saved his life. She drove Sargent to medical assistance in the days before 911, and then he was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to Rapid City Regional Hospital. On the way, his heart and breathing ceased three times.

Sargent survived, but the adventure sapped his strength.”I was a young guy, early 20s, fit, always riding a mountain bike up Spearfish Canyon,” he says.”Then, all of a sudden, I’m turning into an old man.”

A neurologist advised Sargent that coming back would be a long road.”It took me months,” Sargent says. Cycling and therapy in a pool helped his body return to normal, but what happened to him emotionally and spiritually is permanent.

“After you die, like I did in the ambulance, you’re always aware of how fast everything in life can change,” Sargent explains.”And it was more than that. I thought about what’s beyond this life, about the eternal. I began to reconcile my life as I had lived it with how I should live it. I’ve been a good person ever since.”

Tom Kuck has never been struck by lightning, but he came close enough to understand how the experience changes survivors. He owns land in the Black Hills at Moon — one of the best spots on the continent to observe lightning.”We’re on top of the western edge of the Black Hills, 2,000 feet above Newcastle, Wyoming,” says Kuck, a retired wildlife biologist who lives most of the year in Aberdeen.”We can see storms develop and move across the Wyoming plains and it seems like they intensify when they hit the edge of the Hills.”

Ton Kuck’s cabin on the western edge of the Black Hills lies within a lightning hot spot.

“He’s right,” confirms Bob Riggio, who has monitored South Dakota weather for almost 50 years, many of those as a meteorologist at Rapid City television station KNBN.”The Black Hills provide extra updraft as storms move in, coming usually from the west. Updrafts are how thunderstorms get their energy. Often, although not always, these storms start dying as they go into a downdraft on the eastern side of the Hills.”

One day in early summer 2009, Kuck drove six and a half hours from Aberdeen to his cabin at Moon. He decided to mow, knowing rainy weather was approaching. But it didn’t seem imminent.

“I was on the lawn mower and there was a flash and a kaboom at the same time,” he recalls.”It was like a bomb going off above me and it took my breath away. I could taste and smell something like sulphur, and my hair stood straight out.”

The next day he found the pine that had been hit, about 50 yards from where he had been mowing. That’s a long pass in football, but too close for comfort in a lightning storm. Kuck hadn’t given much thought to lightning in all his years in the field as a biologist, but that changed after he witnessed the incredible power up close.

“I’m much more aware,” Kuck says.”Now, when it starts to rumble, I take cover.”

The tree that was hit didn’t burn and wasn’t split open. But Kuck quickly knew it was dead, apparently killed instantly. Needles dropped and no parts of the tree showed signs of life again.

Three years after his close call on the mower, Kuck was asked by the state forester if he would like trees on his property inspected for pine beetles so that afflicted ones could be sprayed to slow the bugs’ spread. Kuck said yes, and during the inspection noticed far more evidence of past lightning strikes than beetle infestations.

“If you count all the trees on my property, most are lightning survivors,” Kuck says. The most common scarring is a telltale vertical split in the bark, often blackened, and sometimes extending to the ground.

Thirty-five years ago, one of Kuck’s trees was split far deeper than the bark.”It was opened up but has been healing and is closed again now,” he says.”Thirty-five years and lightning still hasn’t killed it.”

Lightning isn’t going anywhere. There’s never been a”warp speed” plan for eradicating it, and if we could, would we want to? In some remote areas of the world, fires caused by lightning every few years are the only way certain forests can regenerate. In America, lightning is deeply ingrained in our culture — from tales of Crazy Horse and Benjamin Franklin to mood-setting presences in horror films, classic rock ‘n’ roll lyrics and similes we’ve all uttered:”The answer came to me like a lightning bolt!”

Still, living in a world full of lightning requires some thought. Not to disparage my great-grandmother, but being phobic about this natural force, as she was for her first 12 years, isn’t good. Nor is being lackadaisical, as she was for her last 70. There has to be a middle ground.

Warner believes more and more people are taking rational actions these days, citing fewer injuries and fatalities nationally over the past few years.”They’ve learned, I think, that if you hear thunder, you’re close enough to be struck,” he says.”And actually, you don’t have to be struck to be injured by ground current. When you’re touching metal or standing under a tree during lightning, you’re at risk of becoming part of the conduit channel.”

Indoors is the best place to be when conditions develop, Warner says. Inside a vehicle offers good protection, too. But the pines have to stand tall and steadfastly weather the storm, just as they have for centuries.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Copyright Ruskov/Daytona DVD Inc.