Category: outdoors

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Angels Along the River

By Jarett C. Bies

Kayakers paddling the Missouri River from source to mouth find South Dakotans willing and eager to help. Photo by Jessica Giard.

Each spring, South Dakotans who live along the Missouri River become friends to adventure hunters attempting to paddle the entire river, starting in Montana at the source and continuing to St. Louis (or sometimes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico).

The trip has allure because the Missouri is the longest river in North America at 2,341 miles. After all, would you train to scale a mountain and then fly to Alaska to climb something other than Denali?

As paddlers descend the 500 river miles in South Dakota, they experience some of the Missouri’s most dynamic contrasts. On the state’s northern border, they’re on the inland sea that is Oahe, the”Big Bear,” whose winds can make travel impossible. Lakes Sharpe, Francis Case and Lewis & Clark aren’t much easier. Luckily the state’s long river stretches provide a reprieve, since hundreds of miles still lie ahead for them.

Those who host, help or offer companionship give priceless assistance. Paddlers live off what they can haul, so restocking backpacks and recharging batteries is a necessity. When Mike Norder took ownership of Bridge City Marina near Mobridge, the former owner told him kayakers would be coming through from Montana.”Sure enough, we had folks in that spring, and you do scratch your head,” Norder says.”It’s a crazy journey. These people are taking a year, or longer for the ones doing it each summer, and it’s amazing to me. The isolation out on the river. The personal journey. It’s admirable.”

Only a handful of paddlers came through in Norder’s first year of business, then the number jumped to eight one summer.”We enjoy hosting them, and I guess it was just the way I was brought up. We’ll let them take a cabin if we have one open, just so they can unwind and refresh their batteries,” he says. “We can offer them a place to sleep and a shower. I think when you haven’t had one for a week or longer, it’s a treat.”

Janet Moreland paddled the Missouri River from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico, the first woman to complete the 3,800-mile water journey. Photo by Jessica Giard.

He says his family enjoys the newcomers. “We like to make a party of it. One time we did a walleye feed and then another time we did a steak cookout. We make a celebration out of what they’re doing. I call them river warriors, and it’s nice to pick their minds, to hear about the motivations behind their trips. Like with Janet (Moreland), she was doing it to inspire kids and to raise river awareness. We have a big family, so that’s where we connected.”

Moreland was the first woman and first American to finish the source to sea trip. She started May 1, 2012, and completed her descent to the Gulf of Mexico the following December.

Social media — especially a Facebook page called Missouri River Paddlers — has made a huge difference for water travelers and for South Dakotans willing to help them around a dam, or offer a place to sleep or a hot meal. Pat Wellner, a kayak racer from Pierre, thinks the uptick in paddlers doing the trip is noteworthy, but that the Facebook page, created by paddling enthusiast Norman Miller of Livingston, Mont., has made a big difference in spreading the word.

“The first time I met someone doing the trip was in 2009, and now you can keep track of the river travelers thanks to Norm’s page,” Wellner says.”I guess my motivation to help is our common interests: paddling and the river. It’s fun for me to see how they’ve prepared, the boats and paddles they use, the stay-dry equipment.” He also warns paddlers that the Big Bend area is tricky and that they have plenty of wind and big water yet to come.

Wellner also appreciates the motivation behind the trips. He met Dom Liboiron, a freelance writer who would paddle, stop to work, and then return to paddling. Liboiron dedicated his 2012-13 Montana to New Orleans trip to his late uncle, Mitch, and to raise awareness for heart disease. He learned to appreciate Canadian Rod Wellington’s”no mechanical assistance” approach. Wellington manhandled all his gear and kayak around each of South Dakota’s four dams.

“What they do is tough, especially in terms of time. Finding that much time off, and the money to cover such a trip, is not easy, and that’s why it seems to be college kids or retirees doing the whole stretch,” he says.”There are so many fitness levels. Some are doing it aggressively and others are going at their own pace.” Wellner says many of the paddlers are engaged in”ninja camping” where they alight along any bank or slice of shore available to them.

Shawn Hollingsworth paddled the Missouri River in a homemade pine canoe featuring pink ribbons for breast cancer research. Photo by Rod Wellington.

Journalist Jessica Giard has met a lot of river travelers in her decade-plus of living in Chamberlain. She said many of the source-down paddlers stop in Chamberlain in part because of geography.”There’s not much between Pierre and Yankton, so it’s nice to enrich their travels a bit, but they have to rely on locals, sometimes for help, sometimes for insight on local color or guidance,” she says.”It might be as simple as a meal or a ride to the store.”

Giard’s most memorable experience with source-down travelers came when she joined a group of British adventurers for several days on the water. She says river-lovers quickly find common ground.

“They want to experience more than the terrain. They want to truly know the places they stop, and how life’s lived there,” Giard says.”Each has their own journey, with unique goals and methods, but they have all kept me motivated to keep seeking more adventures and to stop imposing limits on what I do or can do.”

Cheryl Pruett of Platte read of river travelers on Facebook and that made it possible for her to spend time as a hostess for Janet Moreland. Pruett hosted her during a windy set of days near Snake Creek.”I took her shopping and gave her a way to get to town to replenish her supplies,” Pruett says.”We ended up spending a lot of time together, and she was just so warm and truly interested in South Dakota. Janet was definitely a motivator. I was amazed by her journey, a single woman on her own. But she did it, and she made me think I need to do more new things and to never quit exploring.”

A day after Moreland’s departure, Pruett climbed aboard a watercraft and went down river, hoping to see her newfound friend.”We did find her and she’d stopped because she’d broken a rudder cable, so we were able to help her out,” Pruett says.”She called us ‘river angels,’ and it felt good to hear her say that.”

While most kayakers would never dream of replicating the source-down journey, there’s a transitive property to the face-to-face experience. Wayne Nelson-Stastny is a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service scientist, a Wagner native, and a huge proponent of the source-down travelers he’s met. In Yankton, his family hosted Moreland and helped her depart onto the first truly moving water she’d paddled in months.

“Both of my kids had a million questions for her and we had her over, let her get some laundry done. What she’s doing is amazing,” he says.”She’s enhancing the understanding we all have for this river system, but she’s also showing women that great things are possible.”

Nelson-Stastny says he and his family were out on Lake Yankton the weekend after their experience with Moreland.”I’ve been on the river since I was a kid, and I was out there almost every day in the 1990s when I was in graduate school, and you never saw people doing this trip,” he said.”Now you’ll find a dozen or more each spring. It’s inspiring people, and I know it’s inspired my kids. All we did was give her [Moreland] a little rest and a meal. She gave us a lot more.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Navigating the Wild Missouri

By Jim Peterson

Although dams are scattered along the upper reaches of the Missouri River, the stretch from Yankton to Ponca, Nebraska remains wild.

For 53 swirling, twirling miles south of Yankton, the Missouri River still runs wild and free. Navigable waters begin at the bend by Ponca, Nebraska, and continue tamely to the Gulf of Mexico.

Explorers Lewis and Clark and all the other brave souls who traveled the Missouri in the 19th century would best recognize the river today from Yankton to Ponca. Cottonwood trees still line the shoreline and forested creeks wind their way down from hilly grasslands. The same chalkstone bluffs that provided a yellow spectacle to fur traders of yesteryear still stand sentinel to passers-by on the road of water.

Navigating the Missouri was difficult in the 1800s and, at least in that particular stretch, it remains a challenge today. I compare it to an exercise in locating crossings, those areas where the channel crosses from one side of the river to the other. Just as a river snakes down a valley, the channel snakes down the river.

So the art lies in locating the crossings. Probably about 25 crossings lay between the cities of Yankton and Ponca; 25 unavoidable opportunities to ground a big boat.

My river rat friends and I have boated the river on many occasions. So in 1994, when some Floridians bought the Far West riverboat, which had cruised the calmer waters of the Missouri near Yankton as a tourist vessel for several years, they came to us to help them navigate from Yankton to Ponca.

Denny Martens and I thought it would be a challenge and quickly agreed to sign on as guides. Max Brown, a former professional motorboat operator for the Corps of Engineers at Yankton, also came aboard.

The groundings, of course, are what concerned our friends from Englewood, Florida. They were accustomed to sailing such a boat on deep waters — and wise enough to know that the wild Missouri was out of their territory.

Grounding is always troublesome; grounding while down-bound can be catastrophic.

The difference? Bars generally are shaped like sand dunes or snowdrifts; they slant upward to their apex. Once the down-bound rig grounds, its momentum carries it uphill on the bar into shallowing water — and the river’s current relentlessly pushes it on. (On a short bar with a low profile, a lucky operator’s rig may slide over the bar into deeper water.) Grounding as a hazard is matched by another of the Missouri’s infamous hazards: snags — snags in profusion, ranging from twigs to trees, litter the river. The former are of little consequence; the latter may sink a victim. While the steel hull of the Far West was unlikely to be holed, snags were surely a danger to the wooden blades of the paddlewheels as well as to the rudders. Snags and shallows aside, the Missouri harbors many a trap; the grand old stream has a mind of her own and is never to be treated with anything but undiluted respect.

What, then, of the run to Ponca and deep water? A look at some of the truly hazardous passages on the 53-mile run will give the reader a view of running the wild Missouri. From experience, we identified three truly treacherous crossings between Yankton and Ponca. Down bound, in order, lay the upper reaches of the Audubon Bend, the turbulent, severely eroding North Alabama Bend and the infamous Elk Point Bend, just above Ponca’s channelized river. The Far West‘s passage through these potential traps was our main focus.

The Far West eased away from Yankton’s Riverside Park near Mile 806 on June 25 to begin her 2,500-mile run to Florida. One of the Vermillion river rats was stationed in the pilot house, the other ahead in an outboard-powered 15-footer. Three passengers, observers and potential pushers were aboard in addition to one of the Vermillion river rats and the Floridians. The day was clear and bright, the wind light. A fine cruising day though it were, the Missouri soon reminded the voyagers that running the Missouri with a craft of this size was a chancy undertaking. Midway down the Yankton Reach an invisible, deep-lying snag raked the Far West‘s bottom, jolting and tilting her to one side. No damage was ascertainable, and the run proceeded on east, the channel more or less hugging the Nebraska shore. Running slowly and cautiously, the Far West slipped effortlessly downstream, her crew developing a feel for the craft and the river. The day was perfect for running, and the handsome Far West was a spectacular sight on the storied Missouri. An uneventful run through Jacques Bend and the braided St. Helena Bend led to one of the Missouri’s most spectacular sights — the delightful Audubon Bend, Mile 787, west of Vermillion. Here, precipitous bluffs of exposed shale and chalk, capped by a layer of darker loess, rise abruptly above the river. Oak trees cloak the bluffs, while Bow Creek laps their base as its waters languorously merge with the Missouri’s.

The day was clear and bright as the Far West eased away from Yankton’s Riverside Park bound for Florida. With help from local river rats and a dollop of good luck, the Far West made its way through seen and unseen snags and sandbars. After Ponca, the crew faced a clear run down the Mississippi to the Gulf.

Shunted eastward by the unyielding bluffs, the Missouri sweeps down the 7-mile-long Sandhill Reach, one of the longest relatively straight reaches on the river. (The longest is the 16-mile Steamboat Reach, near Pierre.) Here, at Mile 785R, the Far West tied up for the night. With some 32 miles to go and the most hazardous crossings yet to be traversed, caution dictated a stop while the day’s experience was evaluated and the plan for the remainder of the voyage was reviewed. The Far West‘s presence brought people streaming to see the largest sternwheeler to sail this area for decades.

Sunday, June 26, was bright and clear, with a light to moderate northwest wind; a beautiful summer day. Ominously, the river had fallen during the night, a fact starkly announced by the glistening patches of wet bar exposed by the falling river, as well as by a dark, wetted band of shoreline at the water’s edge. The 2-inch or so drop could well be the cause of real problems. Bottom clearance on the Missouri is as often measured in inches as in feel. Encouraged by the ease and success of the previous day’s run, well aware of the cost of delay and now possessed of a better understanding as to how to run this river, the owner said, “Go.”

Aided now by a pair of knowledgeable river rats from Ponca — Bill Conrad and Tim Armstrong (accompanied by a yellow lab named Oatmeal) — the Far West resumed her search for salt water. Crossing to the Dakota shore near the east tip of Goat Island, she skirted the watery grave of the Missouri River Queen, a private ferry that fell victim to the river some two months earlier. Other than an area of turbulence on the Missouri’s surface, there was no sign of the sunken 12-ton Queen. Paddling steadily down the Clay County Park Chute, the skipper acknowledged an assemblage of startled onlookers with a blast of the horn.

Ahead lay the oddly configured crossing at the North Alabama Bend and all attention was focused on that fearsome obstacle. At the outlet of the park chute the Missouri graphically displays one of its seemingly perverse characteristics: it spreads and shallows. The deep, chute-confined waters, which had provided a good, easily seen channel, now fan outward, slowing as the bottom drag increases, and endlessly precipitate much of their sandy load. The neat, comfortably deep channel quickly disappears, replaced by a perplexing maze of shallows, bars and stranded snags. The precipitated sand almost always diverts the spreading waters; the “hose” of the channel becomes the “spray” of a sprinkler. (One could say the waters have been “un-funneled.”)

A crossing is mandated by the delta-like accumulation of sand below the outlet of the park chute. In effect, the river dams its own channel and must then find a way around its own handiwork. The lead boat crept through the braided waters, “dip sticking” constantly to determine if the channel (if it can be so described) still flowed as expected. At one point the crossing’s channel actually curved upstream a bit before being diverted sharply downstream by a submerged bar. The lead boat found an “iffy” 3 feet of water, and the Far West, running as slowly as the need for steerage would permit, crept through the shoal-speckled crossing, the wind and current combining to force her into a crabbing configuration as she fought to follow the slight upstream curvature of the channel.

The tortuous crossing completed, the Far West made a hard left turn as she warily traversed the North Alabama Bend. Immediately she encountered another of the Missouri’s infamous array of snags. On the inner aspect of the bend, the Missouri in recent years has eaten well over a quarter of a mile south into the Nebraska bottomlands, devouring many acres of huge cottonwoods and a country schoolhouse. The remnants litter the river below the cut; the schoolhouse was broken up and only an occasional bit of siding can be found. The cottonwoods often lie where they fell, creating an awesome tangle of massive snags. The Missouri continues its savage assault on the sandy banks, and the sand-laden waters froth as they surge by the bottom-trapped snags. Trees thus snagged are usually trained in the direction of the river’s flow, an advantage for the down-bound craft since, rather than being impaled, it is likely to ride onto and over such snags should one be hit. Occasionally a limber snag will seesaw in the turbulent current: these are the “now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t” sawyers dreaded by the wooden-hulled steamboat captains.

Assiduously tracking the lead boat, the Far West avoided the snags, both the seen and unseen, her crew hoping no deep-lying snag would spear the hull, splinter a paddlewheel blade or shear off a rudder. Emerging from the successful negotiation of this snag field, a course was set into the pooled river above the pinch at Mulberry Bend. Some weeks earlier an up bound towboat and barge grounded in these shallows, spending a day or so struggling to freedom. The Far West did not ground here, but a wake of sandy water graphically underscored just how limited the depth was.

Deeper water and good running lay below the bend, and the Far West methodically swept on down the liquid slope. Crossing to the Nebraska shore at the mouth of the Vermillion, we travelers viewed the shoreline erosion caused by the massive jet of floodwater spurting from the Vermillion during the 1993 flood. The Vermillion’s waters, then 50-feet deep at the mouth, swept the Missouri’s waters aside and slammed headlong into the sandy Nebraska shore. The landowner claims a loss of some 100 acres.

Clearing the newly cut Curry Chute, then easing through the Ionia Bend, the Far West proceeded on, slowing as she approached the long infamous Elk Point Bend. This bend, lying just above the navigation channel at Ponca, is a sprawling, braided, perplexing confusion of low bars and flat water. Here, within sight of Ponca State Park and deep water, lay the Far West‘s major obstacle on the run to Ponca. Slowing as much as she could without turning upstream, the pilot awaited word from the lead boat. A scattering of pleasure boats was clustered nearby, attracted by news of the unusual traveler. Later it was learned most of the viewers expected to find the Far West hard aground, well upstream. The betting was she couldn’t make it to Ponca.

Two hundred yards ahead, a highly visible crescent-shaped reef line marked the downstream edge of a submerged bar. To either side lay bars exposed or barely awash. There being no way around the reef, it was necessary to cross it. The outlook didn’t appear promising. The lead boat, moving slowly, dip sticked what appeared to be the deepest route. Seeking the likeliest route over the bar, the dip sticker scanned the surface for clues as to the depth. What to look for? Sand-laden water, small, up-welling boils, a faint break or irregularity in the ripple delineating the reef line — features a novice would likely never heed. A combination of reading the river, “dip sticking,” and river sense — plus a welcome dollop of good luck — lay back of the successful search for adequate water. At the reef line, dip sticking revealed about 40 inches of water; the Far West‘s draft was 36. This pass — really only an indentation — in the reef appeared wide enough to admit the oncoming Far West, and the signal to come on through was made.

Proceeding as slowly as she could without reversing her paddlewheels, the Far West aimed for the designated pass in the reef. Moving with the current, her rudders had little bite and the paddlewheels were of little value in steering; essentially she was coasting. The Far West‘s windage presented a defenseless target for the northwest wind, and the craft was nudged to her right. This resulted in her almost missing the pass. Her forward third cleared the reef line, but the rearward portion of the hull gently grounded on the submerged bar. Slowly the Far West slid to a halt. Fortunately, she grounded with part of her hull again in deep water, and the Missouri sluicing by the hull soon washed her on over the bar, aided by the flailing paddlewheels — and a most helpful push by the lead boat. Pushing the stern a bit to the right exposed more of the hull to the current and the wind, helping the Far West to slide off the bar to continue her run. Subsequent investigation of the entire Elk Point Bend by the Vermillion river rats revealed that there was then no really deep channel through the bend; the river simply spreads out and filters through a maze of bars chaotically interspersed in a sprawling sheet of shallow water.

Once free of the sandy grip of the bar, a short crossing in good water put the Far West into 20-foot depths hard along the Dakota shore, now heading south to Ponca, Mile 753. Deep water — and a clear run to Florida! Sunday throngs at the Ponca State Park swarmed to ogle the unannounced visitor. No sternwheeler of this size had docked at Ponca since a visit by the Corps’ Patrick Gass in 1936. What a sight under the chalk bluff!

With a navigable channel now at hand, the need for the Vermillion river rats ceased, and we took leave of our charge to start the hill climb to our base at Black Acre on the Sandhill Reach, 30 miles upriver. The Far West did not tarry long at Ponca. With the Ponca river rats (and Oatmeal) aboard, she ran downriver to South Sioux City where she overnighted near the Marina Inn.

The running time from Yankton to Ponca State Park was about eight hours; the river mileage 53 and the speed down the wild river averaged some seven miles an hour (the current is about four miles per hour.) Other than a bit of a tipping by an unseen snag on the Yankton Reach and the skidding over the bar above Ponca, the run was pretty much uneventful. Thirty-one days after leaving Yankton the Far West reached her new homeport at Englewood, Florida. (Near St. Charles, Missouri, she passed near the site where her namesake, Capt. Grant Marsh’s Far West, sank, some years after he brought the news — and the survivors — of the Little Bighorn battle to Bismarck.) Heavy rain closed the Tenn-Tom Waterway, so the Far West ran the Mississippi to the Gulf. Now in salt water, she ran the Intercoastal Waterway where possible. Her luck held, enabling her open gulf run to be made in calm seas without incident. With dry-docking for a repainting, a remodeling for her new role and a change of name, the Lantern Queen served as a dinner boat in the Englewood area.

Somehow, it seems a craft that bore a legendary name and herself mastered the Mighty Mo deserved a better fate.

About the author: Jim Peterson has lived along the Missouri River all his life. He taught business at the University of South Dakota and is now retired in Vermillion.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Quest of the Lost Henry Arch

By Phillip Henry

Beth Krueger is dwarfed by the rediscovered lost Henry Arch.

We were lost. Not the kind of lost where you wander around for days trying to get the attention of circling helicopters, or listen for the sound of blood hounds sent to find you. But we were a mite turned around, and had been for a couple of hours.

We were somewhere in the rough country between Black Elk Peak and Mount Rushmore, and after prolonged brow knitting over my map, I guessed we were in the upper Pine Creek Drainage. From the high ridge we had climbed to get our bearings my plan was to keep heading in the general direction of north, and eventually pop out on Highway 244 in the vicinity of Horse Thief Lake. How to do that with the greatest economy of time and effort was the problem.

It was mid-October of 1974, and my kid brother Cliff and I were on the tail end of a backpacking trip in the Black Hills. I had planned for this to be our last day out, and I hoped to quickly find a phone so I could call home. My wife envisioned a world in which husbands didn’t do these outdoorsy things at all. I had promised her I would wrap our trip up in a few days, and my few days were up.

But that hope was rapidly fading. The drainage we were in was metamorphosing from a broad, gently sloping basin to a high walled, narrow canyon; its slippery boulders and tricky down climbs would have been trouble to negotiate even without the 60-pound packs we carried.

The route to upper Pine Creek Drainage offers views of magnificent spires.

Still, the difficult descent was not without its blessings. As the hiking got tougher our surroundings changed from scenic to spectacular. There were lofty spires paralleling our route on two sides, interspersed with weirdly shaped knobs and monoliths crowned by formations reminiscent of gnomes who had abandoned the netherworld to sit blinking in the sun.

As we proceeded with painful slowness down the canyon an extraordinary mass of twisted rock began to reveal itself, a bizarre sight even in this alien world. Its form kept changing as we approached. From one angle it was a huge twist of bread, prepared by some long forgotten race of titans; as we came around it showed its face to be a massive slab of granite, with a great Jack-O-Lantern mouth frowning toothlessly down at us.

Even in our haste to find a way out of this place we were riveted momentarily by the sight of this great stone arch. During the past three days of hiking around Cathedral Spires and Black Elk Peak we had seen enough striking geological formations to know we were looking at something special. It would be many years before I came to an understanding of just how special.

We unlimbered our cameras and snapped some pictures before hurrying on our way. The going got rougher, requiring two rappels and lowering our packs by rope at points, as though the spirit of the great arch was punishing us for disturbing its rest by making it well-nigh impossible to escape its domain. By the time we reached the highway it was so late we decided to give up on going home that night. We retreated back into the woods, there to make camp.

In time, the details of this trip lost their clarity and merged with memories of other adventures. But now and then thoughts of the arch would come back to haunt me. I shared my experience with others occasionally, and was usually surprised with the underwhelming response it evoked. It seemed no one could get excited about something as prosaic as a rock with a hole in it. Maybe it was one of those moments you had to experience to appreciate.

I made myself a promise to return and locate the arch when I could take more time to fully savor the experience — a promise I finally kept after 23 years. During that time I saw or was told of other arches in the Black Hills, including one of the better known, a graceful span which holds court 350 feet above the Sand Creek road on the Wyoming side.

The structure my brother and I encountered had none of the graceful attributes sometimes associated with the geological phenomena we call arches. It might be more fittingly called a natural bridge, though from my first look I called it the Pine Creek Arch.

My physical condition would not be the major obstacle in my quest. The real challenge would be finding a place I had been to once. A long time ago. While lost.

Arches are formed in soft limestone or sandstone, which is amenable to sculpting by wind and water. Usually they are in rimrock formations, near the tops of drainages where water finds a small channel in the rock to cut through, a hole which gets bigger and bigger with the march of time. The overlying rock that forms the arch is susceptible to the erosive forces of wind and falling water. Together with the running surface water below, they can enlarge the area under the arch to a sometimes-spectacular size before it finally weakens and collapses.

The Pine Creek Arch, on the other hand, was formed in the bowels of the earth. Countless eons ago molten magmas from the world’s fiery core pushed upwards into fissures, faults and cracks in the billions and billions of tons of deposited rock on the old sea floor. There it crystallized and cooled into the spires and shapes we see today, including the arch, but for millennia these formations rested many miles beneath the surface.

Inexorably driven upward by unimaginable forces within the planet, the arch was finally forced into the light of day. Wind and water had been polishing the already ancient formation for centuries before the first humans made their way into the canyon; much later, prospectors might have searched around the hulk for gold. A handful of recreational hikers probably found their way into the narrow cut before we did, and the old arch looked on, unimpressed throughout.

None of which really explains why I became obsessed with finding it again. But over the years I had begun to think of it as “my” arch — The Lost Henry Arch.

Hikers Bob and Peggy Schluening of Sturgis are framed by another arch discovered on the quest.

By the late summer of 1997 I decided that if I was ever going to see the arch again, I had better move ahead. My long-suffering wife, Dorothy, had seen this coming. When I announced that I was going to make a reconnaissance into the upper Pine Creek Drainage before the snow fell, she said nothing, just looked at me as though I had sprouted a banana in the middle of my forehead.

A series of health problems had kept me from attempting anything like that for some time. Though on the mend, I recognized I wasn’t half the man I had been in 1974. I hoped I didn’t have to be. During those intervening years I had acquired the good sense not to carry around 60-pound packs. Besides, I suspected that my physical condition would not be the major obstacle in my quest. The real challenge would be finding a place I had only been to once. A long time ago. While lost.

I spent some time studying topographic maps, but I couldn’t pinpoint any place that fitted my recollection of the lay of the land. Then an unexpected resource emerged in the form of an old friend named Virgil Van Heuvelen, a retired dentist who had been teaching technical rock climbing in the Black Hills for 27 years.

Doc was as knowledgeable as anyone alive about the Pine Creek Drainage, but he had no knowledge of the arch, nor did he know of anyone who might. This was not heartening news.

I had no specific plans formulated when a good friend and strong hiker, John Natvig, by chance blew into town over Labor Day weekend. I had worked with John in the Forest Service for a number of years and shared some backcountry camping trips with him. He is a great navigator, though that was not necessarily a plus since I didn’t know precisely where I wanted to go. But I figured he could keep me from getting lost again.

My idea was to try and find the same high, open ridge my brother and I had climbed to get our bearings, and then retrace our route toward Highway 244. When we reached the ridge I had picked out on the map, though, it was anything but open. Great rock outcrops and lofty pine trees didn’t allow the magnificent 360-degree view I’d had in 1974. I figured the pine trees might have grown up since then, but I couldn’t explain away the rocks.

A notch in a rock wall began to look very familiar — but my God, I thought, had I really led my brother into this treacherous place?

By the time we hiked to where the canyon started to narrow I felt sure we were in the wrong place, and we reluctantly turned for home. On the hike back to the trailhead I remarked that I had snapped some pictures of the arch the day I found it. John, never timid when I have done something less than brilliant, remarked dryly that something like that might have been a help in locating it.

Even though Doc had somehow missed it in his travels, I figured there were people around who knew where the arch was. But I didn’t know who these people might be, and they were not advertising guided tours in the yellow pages. Obsession or no obsession, my chances of returning to the Lost Henry Arch seemed to grow bleaker with each passing day.

Then one evening while talking to my brother Cliff, a bush pilot in Alaska, I asked if he remembered our backpack trip in 1974. To my surprise he remembered it quite well, and went on to describe some of the details of the trip that I had completely forgotten. I asked if he remembered the natural bridge we found in that secluded canyon, and his recollections seemed so convincingly vivid I decided to try again — though the irony of someone two time zones away directing me to a spot 60 miles from my front door was not lost on me.

Going into the rough part of the canyon, I wanted at least three people along. If I fell down and broke my leg I wanted someone to stay behind and stroke my brow while the other person went for help. After a couple of weather-related postponements, three friends and I were finally all available at the same time.

The first was Russell Yuill, of rural Sturgis, with whom I had shared a number of memorable climbing adventures. We drove to just north of Black Hawk and rolled my son-in-law, Shawn Kvanvig, out of bed and loaded him in the car. The fourth member of our party, Beth Krueger, met us at the trailhead.

Shawn Kvanvig, Russell Yuill and Phillip Henry savor the discovery of the lost arch.

We set out at mid-morning into the Black Elk Wilderness, climbing toward 6,000 feet, where we would turn across the slope and try to find the correct drainage. I couldn’t shake some doubts about my brother’s memories, but it was such a fine day I concluded it didn’t really matter. All of our little group would want to be here anyway.

Shawn set a blistering pace that I had no hope of maintaining, so I described the landmarks where he would have to stop and wait for us. I thought Beth and Russell would want to press on with him, but they were content to hang back with me and make idle banter.

After about an hour we left the developed hiking trail and began a steep ascent, paralleling an incredible display of spires and megaliths that now and then looked curiously familiar. As we continued, the hillside steepened noticeably, and the whole affair started taking on the distinct feel of work. We had all packed light, but I had a fair amount of camera gear along, and the pack I carried had a way of reminding me it was there.

Our slow progress gave me time to look about, and I had the distinct feeling we were in the right neighborhood. Armed with the knowledge of where not to go from my last trip, I guided us toward a saddle guarded by towering spires which climbers are fond of calling gendarmes. Once over, we picked our way down a quickly narrowing drainage to a notch in a rock wall that began to look very familiar — but my God, I thought, had I really led my brother into this treacherous place while we were both loaded down with bulky, lurching packs?

Soon the canyon floor widened a bit and became less difficult under foot. We clambered over boulders and leaped a small flowing stream, which I am sure was not there in 1974, and Shawn called my attention to a huge twisted piece of rock coming into view around the bend.

I stopped and looked intently.

“I think that ‘s it!” I cried, more excited than if we had just discovered the biggest gold nugget in the Black Hills. One by one we came to a halt in a little knot on the canyon floor, the arch looming above us, deep gray and older than time. We stared up in awe, speaking in hushed tones, as if we had blundered into some great cathedral during High Mass.

As I stood there the thought came to me that the arch had stood the 23 years better than me. It was much more impressive than I remembered; if anything, I was more astonished than I had been the first time. Beth murmured that if you were going to find one of these things it might as well be a big one. Shawn summed up his feelings in one word: “Cool!” Russell said something that sounded like, “Wow.”

After some moments we overcame our surprise and began to function more normally. I began unpacking my camera gear. Shawn, who takes as a personal affront any attempt by a mere rock wall to bar him from where he wants to be, had already started to work out a route from the stream bed up to the sloping stone shelf where the arch stood. Like a bear cub, Russell was climbing over things, poking, prodding, testing, knowing that no matter what he found there was always more that could be seen. The two found separate routes to the base of the arch while Beth, in her more cerebral way, was taking the measure of the arch, asking silent questions about the how and why of this phenomenon.

While I ascended a steep cleft on the opposite side of the canyon to get a higher perspective, Russell and Shawn were like two gnats buzzing around an elephant as they explored on and around the arch. Beth finally had enough of sitting and looking and joined them.

Later, Russell was kind enough to escort me to a route which he assured me would take me right up to the arch, “without even the need to hang on to anything.” It wasn’t exactly as easy as advertised. I soon found myself doing an impersonation of a man about to be drawn and quartered, with one foot on a step which was more imagination than actual step and the other somewhere back there on terra firma. Beth and Russell came to my rescue, and finally, after all those years, I was within hand shaking distance of the arch.

It was too hard, cold and impassive to extend even a perfunctory greeting. No matter. After exploring around the base for a while I felt satisfied with the day’s work, and decided that I had earned the right to do nothing but rest. We took turns posing for pictures before climbing back down to the canyon floor, and at last there was nothing left but to admit it was time to go.

There were only two practical routes out: the way we had come or down the canyon. I had told my companions the story of our 1974 trip down the canyon — about the rappels, the narrow notches filled with jumbles of wet, slippery boulders and other obstacles. That settled the matter for Shawn. To ignore the challenge would be dishonorable. He would go down canyon.

Russell decided to go along with him. We had already explored one way, after all. What was unknown lay ahead, not where we had already been.

Beth was competent in the art of rappelling, but her rational mind saw no purpose in doing so if a reasonable alternative was at hand. She decided to return up canyon. As for me, I had done all the scrambling about over rocks I needed for one day, and decided to take the easier route with Beth.

It was early afternoon on a perfect autumn day, with a sky too blue to describe and breezes playing tag among the pine trees as we worked our way out of the canyon onto the easier walking above the slot. Soon night would deepen the gloom of the already dark shadows, and the spirit of the arch would return to its slumber.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the May/June 1998 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Creek That Thinks It’s a River

By Jeanne Richardson

Split Rock Creek flows 55 miles through lush woodlands accentuated with quartzite outcroppings.

They call it Split Rock Creek, which is probably an accurate description as far as geographers are concerned. But who can blame some of its aficionados for considering it a river? Beautiful vistas. History. Even its own tour boat. Split Rock has everything a self-respecting river could want — and a charm all its own.

That which we call Split Rock, whether creek or river, was called Eminija before the arrival of white settlers. It springs to life in a pasture northeast of Ihlen, Minnesota, growing slowly before flowing into Split Rock Lake, formed in 1938 when the WPA (Works Progress Administration) dammed the creek south of town. One of the large rocks that protrudes from the ground on the east side of the lake is cleaved nearly in two, hence the name Split Rock. (Some believe that the split occurred over a long period of time, from water freezing, while others think lightning split the rock). Formations of that same reddish-pink stone, known as quartzite, can be found at many spots along the creek, forming the waterway’s spectacular, scenic views.

The meandering creek begins its South Dakota life east of Sherman — a town that once boasted five grain elevators, a stockyard, and an opera house where Lawrence Welk kept toes tapping. But Sherman isn’t what it used to be. About 1 mile west of town, Split Rock bubbles over 486th Avenue. There is no bridge, only a cement pad for the water to flow over, but it serves well enough. Most of the time.

From there the creek wends southwesterly, through Dakota farms, making its way toward Garretson and Devil’s Gulch, a picturesque canyon where scraggly cedar trees and bushes cling to the quartzite walls for life. Even to the unimaginative, Devil’s Gulch is a vaguely ominous place; its name derives from the eerie noises that come from its bowels as the winds blow through. Within the gulch the water lies oily and motionless, except for an occasional gurgle of life, but it is said that powerful currents rage below the surface. Some areas are reported to be bottomless.

Devil’s Gulch is also known as Spirit Canyon, a name based upon Indian legend. It seems that Iktomi, one who was fond of tricks, jokes and “keeping the pot stirred” while making other spirits and men look ridiculous, was challenged by an Indian warrior, Ha-Shootch-Ga, to a tomahawk duel. Iktomi raised his tomahawk and let it fly, high into the sky, then it plummeted to earth and cut a huge, gaping gash. That was the birth of Spirit Canyon. When he witnessed Iktomi’s power, Ha-Shootch-Ga disappeared.

In more recent times, relatively speaking, Devil’s Gulch was visited by the outlaws Jesse and Frank James. They stumbled upon it in 1876, during their escape from the law after a botched bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota. As a posse was closing in the brothers decided to ride in different directions. Jesse soon found himself on the rim of the gulch. Desperately he spurred his stolen horse onward, and with a Pegasus-like leap jumped the 20 foot-wide canyon. Once he was safely on the other side Jesse took refuge in a cave hollowed out of the quartzite canyon walls.

After the creek skirts Garretson’s west side, it flows toward Palisades State Park, a pocket-sized park at scarcely more than 150 acres, but one of the most beautiful spots in all of South Dakota. Its name comes from the steep cliffs of quartzite that rise to heights of 50 feet or more along the creek. Some of the rock formations have been given names such as Castle Rock and Balancing Rock. The park is a paradise for hiking, picnicking, camping, fishing, swimming, rock climbing, nature walks and memory making.

Within the park’s boundaries is the former town of Palisades, but all that remains is the schoolhouse, resting in a barnyard at the south end of the park. These days the school beckons not to scholars but to cud-chewing cows and spirited horses. One day it will be nothing but a memory. As unlikely as it might sound, this area was once the site of a silver mining boom. In 1886, along the shores of the Split Rock Creek and in its guardian quartzite walls at Palisades, Charles Patten discovered silver. His claim was called the Merrimac.

News traveled fast. Within two weeks 300 claims were staked out over 1,000 acres in the area. Records show that even a woman staked a claim: Mrs. Abbie Peterson filed the “Abbie Lode” on March 26, 1886.

Unfortunately, assay reports found the ore to be very low grade — about 3 ounces of silver to a ton of rock. Mining would be just too expensive. It was reported that only two people made money from silver. One was Shanny Kincaid, who charged a dollar to record a claim, and the other a young man who sold his claim for $25.

There still is a possibility of finding wealth in the Palisades, though. According to legend, a railroad paymaster once disappeared in these parts, along with the payroll entrusted to him. The paymaster was later found sitting along the railroad tracks, near Palisades, clothed only in boots and underwear. He couldn’t explain his lack of clothes or where the payroll was, but he did mention something about leaving the money in a satchel in the kitchen and his clothes in a closet. His clothes were found a few years later, tucked in a rock crevice in the Palisades, but no reports ever surfaced about the money being found.

Next on the Split Rock’s journey to the sea comes Corson — which some have been unkind enough to call a suburb of Brandon. You won’t hear that from those with generations of roots there, going back to the Norwegians and Swedes who originally settled the area. But some of those who have made Brandon one of South Dakota’s fastest growing towns might be excused for saying that — once.

On the southeast edge of Brandon lies McHardy Park, a former cow pasture with Split Rock Creek horseshoeing its way through. The land was donated to the Brandon Lions Club by Bryson and Hazel McHardy, who once lived on the banks of the creek, and the Lions in turn passed it on to Minnehaha County to develop into a park.

Near McHardy Park is a spot where, in 1879, the Split Rock showed its deadly side. Two couples set out on a trip to Beaver Creek, Minnesota, from Sioux Falls: Mr. and Mrs. Ole Thompson, and their teenage daughter, Louisa; and Mr. and Mrs. E. K. Lee, accompanied by their 9 month-old son, Clarence, (Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Lee were sisters). The travelers easily forded the creek in their carriage on their way out, but on the return trip, after a couple days of summer rains, the travelers found Split Rock Creek swollen. They believed they could safely cross anyway. Upon entering the creek, though, the current swept their carriage downstream.

Mr. and Mrs. Thompson drowned that day. Louisa was floundering in the swirling waters when another traveler, George Eells, who was waiting on the west bank for the creek to subside so he could cross, heard her hollering. He dove into the creek and rescued her. Mr. Lee managed to struggle to safety, but his wife and their son disappeared in the creek. After rescuing Louisa, Eells noticed a baby’s foot break the surface of the water. Once again he dove in, and finally found the baby. After struggling to shore, he tried to resuscitate him, but Clarence died in his arms. Mrs. Lee’s body was found the next day.

Split Rock Creek, then and now, occasionally demands respect.

About 2 miles south of Brandon is a parcel of ground where, in 1857, a townsite was established by the Dakota Land Company. It was called Eminija, and included the area where Split Rock Creek empties into the Big Sioux River. Eminija’s promoters believed steamboats might one day ply their way from the Missouri River, up the Big Sioux, to the site. Like so many other dreams of that era, however, that one never came to pass. Some old-timers talk about a cabin that once stood there, but no evidence remains.

Just west of the creek, in part of what was to have been Eminija, is a group of 38 dome shaped, earthen mounds, burial sites of Blood Run, a 17th century Oneota city with an estimated population of at least 5,000. In 2013, Good Earth State Park at Blood Run became South Dakotaís newest state park.

All told, Split Rock Creek runs about 55 miles from beginning to end. Not long, as such things are measured. But what Split Rock lacks in length, it makes up for in character.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1999 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Ten Years of Hiking Black Elk Peak

By Rebecca Johnson

Doing the same thing repeatedly may sound boring but it hasn’t been for Matt Jackson, a Rapid City carpenter who has hiked Black Elk Peak once a month for the last 10 years. His first trek was in 1980 while visiting from Chicago on a church retreat. Jackson was so amazed by the Black Hills’ beauty that he moved there in 1982. He was awed again while hiking Black Elk in the fall of 2005 and pledged to climb each month the following year. One year turned to several and Jackson thought,”No reason to stop.”

Black Elk Peak’s rocky, tree-strewn paths lie within Custer State Park and the Black Hills National Forest, with the most frequently used trailheads at Sylvan Lake. Jackson quickly explored every inch of those, and then realized that since his first climb in 1980 the routes had been changed to fight erosion. Staying on the trails is wise for novice hikers, but exploring off path is allowed — and Jackson has. He’s also a rock climber, so he’s comfortable scrambling through unfamiliar territory. He especially likes discovering old trail markers.”It’s kind of like forensic hiking to figure out where stuff went,” Jackson says.”Some of the abandoned trails are just spectacular.”

Unpredictable weather makes the area genuine mountain country. Jackson encountered large amounts of rain and hail on an ascent last May.”I was in an area I’d never been before and got kind of disoriented,” Jackson recalls.”But I could always see Black Elk Peak.” The sky had cleared when he began his descent.”Because of the amount of rain and snow, the water in this particular area was really flowing. Way down in one of those rocky canyons there was a gushing waterfall probably 25 feet tall. I’d be surprised if 10 people a year saw that spot.”

And few have probably seen the sunrise from the iconic fire tower, but Jackson did one June.”That happens at about 5 o’clock in the morning, so I had to leave home at 2:30. My wife said, ‘You know, you’re getting kind of crazy with this.’ But on the other hand, she’s very supportive because she will shuttle me on some of the hikes. When it’s a nice, calm and beautiful day, when a sensible person gets out and hikes, we’ll go together,” Jackson laughs.

One day in 2006 Jackson’s wife plucked a four-leaf clover. And though he didn’t find it, maybe the luck was still his. Jackson completed his 10-year streak in December 2015, at the age of 59.”The last two hikes I did up Black Elk Peak were over 15 miles. A lot of people I know 10 or 15 years younger, they couldn’t do it if they wanted to. I’m just thankful to be able to do it.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Where Elk Speak

By Paul Higbee

The bugle of an elk is unmistakable and unique. Seasoned buglers can identify individual elk based solely on the animal’s call. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

I thought Kevin Lineback was playing me for a greenhorn when he stooped, picked an inch-long elk dropping from the forest floor and pronounced it the product of a bull elk rather than a female.

No, he assured me later, there’s a difference in shape — Black Hills outdoorsmen can tell. I should have known Lineback was being straight with me. He has a fine sense of humor, but I’ve never heard him joke about elk, or about the special place he goes to watch them.

An hour before dawn that cold fall morning, Lineback and I had bought coffee at Spearfish’s Mini Mart.

“You didn’t use any deodorant or cologne?” he asked, and I answered no. He’d told me the night before that elk can smell those substances at great distance, and that I needed to also avoid bright colors and freshly laundered clothes. So, appropriately muted in hue and naturally scented, we warmed ourselves with coffee as we drove from Spearfish up a gravel road a few miles. Then we hiked along a clear stream in a narrow draw. After 15 minutes, the sky was turning gray as we reached a pool fed by the stream; the mud had been gashed and marked with large hoof prints.

“A wallow,” Lineback whispered. Here a bull elk had created its own cologne by digging up the soft mud, urinating in it and then rolling in it. That’s part of the rutting ritual each fall, when bulls show off by sight, sound and smell. Then it’s pretty much the cow elk’s decision with whom to mate and run.

From the wallow we made an aerobic climb out of the draw and walked through wide stands of aspen and ponderosa pine. Not far from where he picked up the dropping, Lineback motioned me behind a wide pine trunk and said, “With luck we’ll get you face to face with a bull. Well, maybe not face to face, but real close.”

He produced an elk call, an instrument with a latex reed that fits into the mouth, and a 2-foot corrugated plastic tube — a “grunt tube” for imitating various snorts and growls. “Years ago, when I was learning to call, I sounded like a wounded animal from another planet,” Lineback once told me. “I drove my wife crazy, and my neighbors. The call fits way back by your wisdom teeth, so when you’re learning, you’re trying both to get the right sound and to prevent yourself from gagging.”

He pierced the still air with a clear, high trumpet tone.

Silence.

Lineback waited a minute, then called again. This time, almost immediately, he was answered. Through the trees floated the sound most symbolic of the natural American West: the musical bugle of the bull elk. And music it is, too rich in tone to be called a moo, or screech or anything else.

Kevin Lineback demonstrates his call, with its grunt tube for imitating snorts and growls.

Lineback called again. He usually tries to mimic the sound of the elk he’s calling, and each animal sounds different. He’s been able to recognize certain bulls from year to year by their distinctive bugles.

Again Lineback was answered. How far away was the elk? Quarter mile? Half mile? I couldn’t guess. But when it answered a sixth or seventh time, it was suddenly much closer. A couple minutes later we could hear branches and undergrowth snapping, maybe a hundred yards off.

Something huge was moving our way.

Properly speaking, these animals are called wapiti. Once, they ranged as far east as the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. There, English settlers needed to distinguish them from small deer and took to calling them “elk,” the term for a European moose. The name stuck. Although they are part of the deer family, they differ from white-tailed and mule deer common to the Black Hills in countless ways, beginning with the way they noisily crash through the forest, and their size. A half-ton bull elk weighs easily four times what a large mule buck would weigh. Also unlike deer, a bull elk mates by attracting a “harem” of 15 or 20 cows, then fighting off other bulls. That’s partly what all the bugling is about each fall — the bull Lineback called thought another bull was challenging him for cow rights.

There is evidence that elk roamed South Dakota 35,000 years ago. Plains Indians hunted them for meat and hide, created ornaments from teeth, fashioned tools from bones and antlers and ground antlers to make medicines. Lewis and Clark, in 1804 and 1806, found Manitoban elk on the prairies along the Missouri River, but 75 years later few remained on the Plains. Gold rushers in 1876 found the Black Hills rich with Manitoban elk, but, within a dozen years, they were also gone. Between 1911 and 1920, 200 Rocky Mountain elk (lighter in color than the Manitoban, and with bigger antlers but slightly smaller bodies) were transplanted from the Tetons and Yellowstone to the Black Hills. They thrived and were the beginning of the Hills’ present herd, which numbers more than 2,000. Archery and rifle hunting each fall keeps the herd size constant, and the state Department of Game, Fish and Parks, the U.S. Forest Service and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation work together for the herd’s well being and for improved habitats.

Bill Aney, wildlife biologist for the Forest Service, has hiked with Lineback to that special place many times. “Kevin’s spot is ideal for elk,” Aney told me. “It’s isolated. There’s plenty of water, which isn’t all that common in the Black Hills. There’s a nice mix of aspen, birch and pine, which makes a cool microhabitat that elk like.”

Those are conditions the Forest Service works to enhance elsewhere through road closures for isolation, water catchment and efforts to hang on to aspen and birch growth. In some parts of the Hills, meadows have been cleared for better forage.

During the fall rut, bull elk attract a harem of several cows and then fight for supremacy. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

It hasn’t happened in the Black Hills yet, but human population encroachment in parts of the West has led to elk losing fear of people. That brings up another distinction between deer and elk — deer can hurt people when cornered or protecting fawns, but they are Bambis compared to an aggressive, hormone-driven bull elk, in rut with a full set of antlers. Lineback recently read about a bull that terrorized a community in another state until authorities sawed off its antlers.

“They would have been better off killing him,” Lineback said. “To send him off to face other bulls without his antlers, and with no way to protect himself from predators, was terrible. They took the crown from the king.”

Lineback had told me that a bull’s bugle, at close range, is a powerful statement, “a nine hundred or thousand pound animal proclaiming to the world that it’s his mountain.”

It is powerful, and indeed majestic when you add the visual image of the bull moving in search of the caller, closer and closer, until he stands just 20 yards away.

Elk are much larger than the white-tails and mule deer that also roam the Hills. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

That’s how close the bull came to us that morning. Then he stood suddenly still, all 900 pounds of him; Lineback had explained they sometimes pose silently when they know they’re near the competing bugler, as if to say, “Look. I’m a force to be reckoned with.” I twisted around the tree trunk and snapped a photo, concerned that the bull’s white rump would register bright in my picture while the rest of him, grey and brown, would blend into the forest background. And yes, his vast antlers were like a crown, six points on either side. With them he dug at the ground, sniffed the dirt, then sniffed the air. He was deciding something was wrong, that no other elk were present, though he hadn’t spotted us. Slowly he lumbered back the way he came, and then ran. Beyond our view we heard him stop, and Lineback, using the same call instrument, began “cow talking” … a series of mews and chirps. In Lineback’s experience, cow talk brings a bull back about nine times out of 10.

But not this one. He bugled back once, and then was finished with us. We realized it was a cold morning for standing motionless, which we’d been doing for several minutes, and we began walking back to the car. En route, Lineback found tracks he knew were made by cow elk (“their hips are wide, so the rear hoof marks are outside the front”) and trees where bulls had stripped bark with their antlers. His tracking and calling skills keep Lineback in demand as a guide for elk hunters, but he never brings them to this place.

It’s been several years since Lineback’s drawn a hard-to-get Black Hills elk hunting tag, but he hunts them annually in Idaho. “Hunting is one way I help take care of an animal I admire,” he said as we drove back to Spearfish. “If there were no hunting, there would be immediate overpopulation and starvation.

“An elk means a year’s worth of meat for my family,” he continued. “Take the animal’s weight, subtract about 60 percent for bone and waste, and that’s how much meat you’ve got.”

He has no patience for deer hunters who accidentally shoot elk, which happens every year in the Black Hills. “Having hunted both animals, I can tell you there’s just no way you should mistake one for the other, because of the size difference. If you can’t tell, or just don’t care, either way you shouldn’t be out there.”

The sun had climbed over Lookout Mountain’s shoulder as we reached Spearfish. “You know,” I said as we drank Mini Mart coffee again, “we’ve had an experience some people would drive a thousand miles for, and save money all year for.

Lineback nodded. “I can’t imagine why everyone who lives in the Hills isn’t out there. But I’m glad they’re not.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Birdwatcher’s Wings

By Juli Wilcox

Willis Hall used a trip wire to photograph himself with a trio of red-tailed hawk fledglings.

I sat in the hospital room, watching my friend breathe. He was 86. I felt a little guilty watching him, because he was the most private person I ever knew, and I’m not sure he would have approved; yet it is hard to look away when you love someone. Sometimes we think if we do just a little more, it will be all right. Of course it is not our decision. Willis would have us know that.

I knew Willis Hall for 25 years. He was my mentor and my friend. That he and Rosamond let me be with them was a gift.

I met Willis for the first time when they came to our house to show a group of Yankton College teachers some bird slides. It was love at first sight. He, his Rosamond, and their incredible photographs are the things on which I imprinted as fast as a gosling on the goose. I was cooked. At 7 the very next morning, the three of us began our first of hundreds of birding trips. We three, and sometimes my husband too, eventually would cross what seemed like every prairie pothole and dusty back road in the six-state region. We never took the main road except to get to another dirt road. My gift to Willis was to find a back road he hadn’t traveled before.

By canoe in the summer, he introduced me to least terns and piping plovers on Missouri River sandbars. Above the river, in the low oak hills and on grass-covered bentonite clay cliffs, we found Dutchman’s breeches and the pasqueflower in the spring and buffaloberries and LeConte’s sparrows in the fall. We hiked the hills, checking wild plum bushes for Bell’s vireo and spotted towhee nests and scouting for deer, turkeys, prairie ring-necked snakes and his favorite, great horned owls.

In the winter, we kicked the soccer ball over the park trails or skied the woods in search of red-bellied woodpeckers and bluebirds.

And in the last two years, I played my first tennis ever, with a man who had played for 70 years. Ever patient, he never gave up on me; he just kept putting the ball over the net. If we were distracted by nighthawks and nuthatches at his favorite park counter, so much the better.

In the early days we spotted and counted birds, and he photographed. Rosamond judiciously jotted their numbers and exact locations on the back of recycled envelopes in writing so small a magnifying glass was required to read it. From him I first heard very patient answers to my questions about bird identification, photography and all things having to do with the natural world. If I spotted a bird, impulsively calling it out, Rosamond would always say,”Willis?” and only when he confirmed a sighting, would she add it to the list. I think it was five years before they accepted my birds.

His friend Phil Hall from North Dakota, who explores and writes on the natural history of the Badlands, also writes of Willis’ patience. “One spring, I believe it was in 1982, I noticed that a golden eagle had reclaimed its nest high up in the wall that defines the east side of Red Canyon. I phoned Willis, and 36 hours later he and Rosamond appeared in the pasture by my cabin. After the obligatory tea for an Englishman, we set out for the eagle’s nest, which was about 10 miles down the canyon. While the nest looked close to the road, it was a deceivingly long hike, and just short of vertical. Willis led the way, hauling a camera, a big lens, binoculars, and a heavy camera bag. At the time, I was 39 and he was 69. I struggled to keep up with him.

“We advanced as far up the canyon wall as possible. There, we ducked behind a scrubby cedar tree. Out of his bag, Willis produced a small piece of camouflage cloth, which he draped around us. We sat like rocks for two hours. However, I twice shifted my weight and once had to scratch an itchy nose. We waited without breathing.

“The eagle never came, and Willis finally announced that we should hike back to the pickup. I was chagrined at not being able to show him the eagle. As we gathered up the equipment, I asked, ‘Willis, why do you think the eagle never came to its nest?’

“‘We moved too much,’ he replied.”

At home he was constantly on the move. If Rosamond was his ears, he was her legs. She might say, “Willis, get me the bird notes from the kitchen.”

He would respond, “Where are they?”

“In the pea bag on the counter.” He would go, and return empty handed and baffled. She would carefully repeat, “Pea bag!”

“Oh!” he said, “I thought you said tea bag.”

And they both would exchange glances that said, “Pay attention, dear. Speak more clearly, dear.” But they were smiling at each other.

Their relationship was a curious delight to the college students. She regarded her students highly and held extra classes at their home. One of her former French students wrote, “I remember one time Miss Burgi called to Willis to please bring that cereal box to her. When she had it she reached in and pulled out my homework. Of course! Homework in a cereal box. He was dear and I knew there was some serious devotion going on in that house. “

Theirs was indeed the language of serious devotion. They chose their cadences carefully. She may have been the professor of Latin, but he was the poet. He spoke plain English.

From her I first heard exotic bird terms. “Is that a bird or an excrescence?”

I asked for translation, and Willis, in all seriousness, answered, “Excrescence — a bump on a log — excrescence.” And looked at her. And she smiled.

Rosamond once told me she would rather be struck from a mountain than linger aimlessly. In 1992 she suffered a stroke and passed from her mountain. He believed he would be with her again. In 1998 he wrote the poem Almighty God.

A few leaves flutter in the breeze.

These too shall all be gone.

Almighty God shall bring them

back again.

Each one, its perfect self, shall be

A part of me, as it has been.

She too, My Rosamond,

shall be again.

Willis never wanted to impose. Waiting at the doctor’ s office, he had a sniffle. I told him I had taken a zinc lozenge for my sniffles. He seemed absolutely mystified. He looked at me, and rather than have me repeat, an imposition, he tried to further the conversation by eliciting more information. He questioned, “Where does one get such a substance?”

“Oh, probably from chewing rocks,” I replied.

Somewhat alarmed, Willis said, “From chewing rats?”

Now this was a man who rescued bats and carried indoor insects outside so they’d have a fighting chance. “No,” I said, “from chewing rocks, r-o-c-k-s.” Concerned that I had confused rather than amused him I said, ”I’m only kidding, Willis. It’s a joke.” He, waiting for me to breathe as I watched his face, looked me straight in the eye and said the only zinc he knew was the kitchen zinc.

With deep relief for the moment and for so much else, I laughed. I detected a sly smile on his face. I knew that once again — I’d been cooked.

We moved Willis from the protected environment of his hospital room to an adjoining nursing home where we hoped he could convalesce from the pneumonia for which he’d been hospitalized. His beloved brother, Winston, had died six weeks before, and he was greatly saddened.

Several times over those weeks in the hospital, health care workers asked me if he was my father. One day, through deafened ears, he responded , “Daughter … and mother.”

I combed his gray hair and said he looked like a tufted puffin, the longhaired seabird whose wings are better suited for diving for fish than for flying. He said he had never had a higher compliment. Two weeks later he said he felt he had come to the end of a long race. The next week he said he wished he could start over. When I asked if he wanted anything he replied, “What I want is unobtainable.” Three days later he had a small stroke. He did not recognize the oak bough I brought. For another day he said nothing.

And then he revived.

A long time ago, trying to keep up with him, I had asked Willis if he could live without walking. He said he guessed on his deathbed he’d get up and take a walk. And he did. At sunset, we went outside and walked the half block to the edge of the bluff. In silence we looked down at ducks silhouetted on a silver bend in the river.

I told him I had spoken with his oldest friend, Wes Cook, who now lives in New Mexico. His eyes widened. “Is he well?” Willis asked. Those were his last words.

I had brought him a gift, a large photo I’d taken in Alaska, a single tufted puffin facing the sea. He looked at the bird. He smiled at me and nodded. This time he would have to fly.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Joys of Cactus

By Michael Melius

Six species of cactus, including these prickly pears, can be found in South Dakota. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

One time I walked barefoot through this West River prairie. I’d just waded across the Grand River in an area of Forest Service land north of Bison, headed for some high sand dunes along the river. The fine gray sand of a cow path enticed me, and I kept my boots off.

It was unnerving. My brain knew nothing could grow in that trail, but my feet half expected a painful poke from a cactus spine. Perhaps some dried-up chunk of prickly pear, its spines still sharp and hard, had been carried there on a cow’s hoof. My feet knew firsthand about jumping cactus.

If you’re not familiar with jumping cactus, a kind of prickly pear, don’t worry. One will find you. You’ll be striding along and suddenly feel a nerve-jangling stab in one knee. Look down and there’s a cactus impaled there. It’s a small stem, barely an inch long with spines even longer, that broke off from the main plant when touched by your boot. From there it travelled up your pant legs from one to the other, until it reached your knocking knees.

When you toss the thing aside in disgust, that’s just fine with the cactus — it may root down there and start a new life. Where there was one plant are now two, and you’ve served the jumping cactus’ survival, reproducing by division.

The jumping cactus is also known as brittle cactus, and probably has been called other cursed names. It’s one of six species of cactus that call South Dakota home. The most common are the prickly pears, which grow with jointed segments shaped like mice ears. The other species are rather small, rounded balls or columns. There are two kinds of the aptly named pincushion cactus — if you can imagine a pincushion with the points sticking out. The rarest one is the hedgehog cactus, which ranges into the southwest corner of the state and is unique for having green flowers.

Cacti are plants that have evolved strictly in the Americas, and are related to rough and succulent plants like purslane and pigweed. Another classification for our region could rank them between needle grass and rattlesnakes, along with yucca, catfish, wasps and porcupines: the armed and dangerous class.

In South Dakota, only the brittle cactus and one of the pincushion species can be found east of the James River. They all can live most anywhere, from hard rock cliffs in the Black Hills to cut banks along the Missouri River, and in the many varieties of clay in between. Even low places have cactus, especially West River, where such places don’t stay wet for long.

Although they are living symbols of deserts, cacti are actually all about water. They excel in living without rain, sopping it up when it comes, and then storing it for long periods. They have only tiny leaves that soon fall; it’s the stems that carry on photosynthesis for the plant. The stems have a thick, waxy skin with only a few pores to transpire moisture. The pores open mostly in the cool of the night.

Between rains, the stems shrivel and the roots contract to save moisture. A broken off piece of stem can be quite dry and still be revived by precipitation. When rain does come, the cactus’ shallow roots send out fast growing rain roots to gobble it up. Few other plants are so adapted for exploiting the ephemeral moisture of light showers. The rain is promptly transported to stems, which swell for storage.

Cactus in our region also must survive winter. Most species of cactus are restricted to regions with mild winters. Here, they shrivel before winter — with less water, they’re less apt to burst from freezing. They also go though a process called cold hardening, which gradually prepares them for sub-zero temperatures. One cactus researcher found that pincushion cactus have the greatest ability among the 20 species studied to cold harden. That cactus has a range that reaches into southern Canada.

Cacti can grow everywhere from river valleys to the Badlands. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

The spines are the final touch. Without them, such succulent plants wouldn’t last 10 minutes out here. Prickly pears have an added detraction: fine, pointed hairs that surround the spines. Called glochids, these barbed bristles are painful all out of proportion to their size. With their size and golden translucence, it’s an added pain just to find and remove them from your skin.

So, are cacti good for nothing? Animals can graze the plants — after a wildfire has singed off the spines. In hard times, ranchers in the southern plains have used torches for that purpose, to provide livestock forage.

Prairie birds such as upland sandpipers and lark sparrows have been observed to nest in patches of prickly pears. In that thorny fortress the birds can rest assured a soft-pawed predator won’t just stumble upon their nest. The patches are often riddled with burrows of small rodents, as well.

The cacti also serve as a refuge for other vegetation. Livestock and other animals won’t graze too close to the spines, so grass and other prairie plants can thrive there, especially in droughts when grazing can have great impact. As the drought ends, the grasses recolonize the grazed areas, and the cacti go into a relative decline.

For people, cacti have long been a source of food. There’s evidence that Plains people were eating the prickly pear pads and fruit as early as 6,000 years ago. The fruits, called pears, are especially sweet. They ripen to a magenta red in July and are eaten fresh, or dried for later use. In modern times, the pears are used for making jellies and candy.

The pincushion cactus also has edible fruit. The fruit ripens in April, a year after flowering. Although the plants are low to the ground with fruits barely a quarter inch long, the fruits stand out in that season, when they are by far the reddest thing around. I use a little plant stem to pop them loose from the protective spines, then spit out the tiny seeds as I savor the sweet pulp. I like to think they’re capsules of vitamin A, and that eating them helps me see them.

Dakota Indians have often eaten the pads of prickly pears raw, or dried them for use in thickening soups. The inside of the pads contains a slippery, sticky mucilage, which is good for fixing paint on hides. That mucilage makes the opened pads a soothing dressing for wounds, much like aloe vera.

Settlers along the Missouri River found yet another service for the pads. They cut them open and placed them in a bucket of muddy river water. The mucilage soaked up the sill, clearing the water for drinking.

For those who find the very thought of eating cactus painful to contemplate, spineless varieties are available. Called nopales, they are commonly used in Mexican cooking, and can sometimes be found in larger supermarkets.

One thing everyone can agree on — the flowers are gorgeous. Borne atop the plants as if focused on the sun, the blossoms are showy with a texture reminiscent of silk flowers. The colors range from brilliant yellow to deep pink.

It’s the flowers, as well as the hardy and exotic growth of the stems, that make cactus plants so attractive to gardeners both indoors and out. One South Dakotan who made a career of his passion for cactus and other prairie plants was Claude Barr. Barr homesteaded in the Smithwick area of Fall River County in the early 1900s. His family survived on the limey upland soils there partly because he made an income from selling seeds and plants to gardeners around the world.

In his long life, Barr traveled widely over the Great Plains, and transplanted many of his favorite wildflowers to the yard of his “Prairie Gem” ranch. He ultimately shared much of his experience, knowledge and love for native plants through a book, Jewels of the Plains.

Through Barr’s writing, the plains come to light as a living fabric of plants. It’s a fabric of great breadth and incredible detail, ever-changing and almost animated. For instance, Barr calls the jumping cactus “the little hitchhiker,” and speaks of it enlarging its territory in North America by riding in the hides of animals.

Barr brought several new varieties of plants to the attention of the horticultural world, including prickly pears known for their spectacular flowers and colored spines. A badlands milkvetch that he first identified bears his name.

Continuing the work of Claude Barr is one of the missions of the Great Plains Native Plant Society, based in Hot Springs. One of the Society’s prime goals is to create botanic gardens for Great Plains plants.

Cindy Reed, president of the Society, reports that they are on the verge of choosing a site near the Black Hills. Once established, the garden will be the first of its kind to feature plants of a very large yet somewhat overlooked region, the Great Plains.

The botanic gardens might not feature the jumping cactus; it’s just too much of a nuisance. But as an educational tool, it could save people from learning some painful lessons.

The tale is told of a South Dakota rancher who stepped outside in stocking feet and was greeted by a prickly pear that had rooted in his lawn. He went after it with an axe. That prickly pear had revenge of its own, though. By the next spring all those hacked-up pieces had sprouted roots and made new plants.

Back in the 1960s, another rancher, living on some really poor soil east of Newell, tried a novel solution for the prickly pears that covered his pasture. He used a swather and ran it low over the ground through the cactus. It worked.

Those prickly pears were all gathered into swaths. Of course, they rooted down, becoming a rabbit-high shelterbelt of cactus. They’re probably still there.

Hard experience has shown those cacti are tough to beat. Trouble is, you can’t quite join ’em either.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1997 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Dakota Skies

By Robert Adams

The Milky Way can easily be seen in rural South Dakota, where light pollution is minimal. Photo by Eric Sprecher

Earth-orbiting satellite photos taken at night show huge blotches of light covering vast regions of the United States from coast to coast with illumination. So it isn’t difficult to understand why the places are growing fewer and fewer in our turbulent society where one may find sanctuary in some private, treasured spot uninvaded by diffused light. Fortunately, here in South Dakota — and generally in the Northern Plains — such spots are still abundant, and we may still enjoy such things as the subtle colors of dusk where the marriage of light and darkness produce the offspring of quiet beauty and peace.

Also, many of us in the plains region live where we have uninterrupted views of most horizons. If I want to see the Big Dipper to determine clock-time or the date by observing the position of the dipper’s handle, I can walk a few yards from my front door in rural Howard and there it is, hovering high over the northeast horizon in mid-March. If I want to see where the morning sun’s latest rising position has shifted to the eastern horizon as it moves steadily toward the north from its stay in the tropics, I can peer out of my front window. Where I have lived in the past, structures would block the view, or I would have to travel quite a distance to see such things and most often, the skies would be too hazy and the stars too faint except on very unusual evenings when clarity overrode the obscurity.

So I can assure you that when we moved back to South Dakota from Iowa we were awestruck by the unobstructed skies and amazed by the apparent indifference of many who live here and take our skies and stars for granted. A beautiful sunrise or sunset was just something one assumed because it is nearly always there. Nor was a star-studded sky regarded as unusual. Curiously, it is when we don’t have something that we appreciate it the most, but when it is available to us at any time we tend to disregard its value. It is true that other states in the Midwest may also have marvelous vistas of their skies, but differences in populations and area make a crucial difference in perception. For instance, in land area South Dakota has 20,000 square miles more than the state of Iowa, yet there are 2.2 million fewer people here. Statistically, that’s approximately 55 people per square mile in Iowa, whereas in South Dakota there are only about 11 people per square mile … of course, in both states the populations are concentrated around several metropolitan areas, but that also means a lot more rural areas here and a lot more unobstructed space from which to view the wonders of Dakota skies.

The Northern lights can sometimes be seen as far south as South Dakota. Photo by Christian Begeman

I can attest that the accessibility of Dakota skies and distant horizons is one of this state’s great unheralded treasures. I was acutely aware of this reality when my family moved from Vermillion to Iowa. In Vermillion, where I taught astronomy for 18 years, I would routinely take photographs of the rising positions of the sun along the eastern horizon to show students the sun’s progress through the changing seasons. Weekly changes in position were astonishing to most of them, though many had a vague awareness of this solar motion. But in Iowa, where we were usually surrounded by trees and buildings, few were conscious of this celestial ballet as the sun danced up and down along the horizons through the year. What a striking drama of the sky to miss!

In 1852, the always perceptive Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal that, “The blue bird carries the sky on his back.” South Dakota carries the sky in its heart and mind as well, and above its long, golden prairies and Black Hills day and night. In few places does the universe open its arms to the sensitive observer in such welcome.

Fortunately, for most of us living under Dakota skies, light pollution (which has become an annoyance of major proportions in many other states) is not a significant factor. Light pollution refers to the extravagant use of artificial light, particularly in cities and towns, which acts to blot out fainter light from natural sources, such as star filled skies. But here on the plains, if the weather is clear, even faint light from distant celestial phenomena is visible in most places even with yard lights present. I was particularly impressed by this one night when my wife and I were returning home through the rural countryside. We traveled on gravel roads most of the way, so no street lights or other bright illumination was present, and except for our headlights the only other light came from the stars.

It was a magnificent night. The moon, which was at the waning crescent stage, had dropped out of sight below the western horizon hours before in its eternal pursuit of the sun. From horizon to horizon the sky was like black velvet sprinkled with myriad points of glistening light. The Milky Way stood out boldly stretching among the stars like the well-trodden path the Sioux have spoken of when describing the route of departed spirits — the brightest stars along the way being campfires where the spirits paused.

Sun dogs appear when ice particles in the air refract rays of sunlight. Photo by Christian Begeman

Constellation forms were so pronounced everywhere (even through the dusty windshield of the car) that I felt compelled to stop and get out for a moment to drink in that sweet, celestial nectar. Except for an occasional stirring by an errant western zephyr, there was no sound in those magical moments. And in that pristine splendor, my heart was grateful to be free of distracting thoughts. I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the universe that engulfs us.

It was then that I first noticed a faint, almost indistinguishable glow along the northern horizon. There were no towns in that direction, so I surmised that it was the beginning of a display of Northern Lights — the Aurora Borealis. The ancients knew her as the “northern dawn,” and she began to show her brightening face as the glow gradually crept farther up into the waiting night sky. Very faintly the glow pulsed and throbbed, resembling wind blowing through gossamer curtains. By the time we had returned home a single, faint ray stabbed up toward the zenith overhead and then fell back again into the diffuse glow along the horizon, as though it were conserving its energy. Then, it vanished.

Had we lived anywhere else but the Northern Great Plains, I doubt if we would ever have seen that subtle goddess of the night silently tiptoeing along the dark corridors of the northern horizon in her luminous gown and flowing veils.

There are so many wondrous things to see in the Dakota skies. They somehow take on a different feeling here than anywhere else I have lived — and I have lived in New York, New England, the mid-Atlantic states and Florida. Even the new crescent moon seen just above the western horizon on the plains in the early twilight moves some authors to poetic arrangements of words. Fred Schaaf, an astronomer of some note, wrote, “delicate and lovely are words that well describe the sight of a slender crescent moon afloat on the shores of the sun’s afterglow, set on the edge of the deepening shades of night.”

It is little wonder that the skies produce such awe and inspiration for people who are attuned to them. One has only to watch and to wonder about what is being seen. There are many things which may have sparked your curiosity and made you wonder as well. Have you ever wondered about those sundogs you’ve seen as the sun sets and the winds are whipping up newly fallen snow? Well, those bright patches of light are related to the softly luminous rings you may sometimes see surrounding the sun and sometimes around the moon. They are called “parahelia,” and they can be very complex. I once received a telephone call from WNAX, a radio station in Yankton, when many people spotted a number of interconnecting circles of light around the sun and more than a few worried about the world’s end. Others just wanted to understand what was happening in their skies.

Larger raindrops produce more vivid color in summertime rainbows. Photo by John Mitchell

Have you ever been curious about those long dark rays that seem to stretch across the twilight sky in the summer just before a storm arrives? They are called “crepuscular rays,” and some may well be the projection of cloud shadows hundreds of miles to the west of your position. They often announce the approach of a storm. And what about those falling stars (meteors), some of which are but tiny needle scratches of light and others yielding broad bands of colored light from horizon to horizon? What are they, and why are they so different from one another? And what about the common rainbow? Have you ever noticed that when you are fortunate enough to see two rainbows, the second rainbow has colors that are reversed from the first?

Not all of these wondrous phenomena are strictly astronomical in nature and some would properly belong in the meteorologist’s notebook, but meteorologists, astronomers and poets share a common love for these marvels of nature. And all of us appreciate the Dakota skies, which, clothed in sparkling stars by night and bathed in the light of a glorious sun by day, sustain our bond with nature and lift our view and thoughts to other things than the world’s tears.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Prairie Isn’t Prairie Without Sky

By Linda Hasselstrom

Photography by Greg Latza

Sunlight illuminates the rolling prairie north of Mission Ridge, near the confluence of the Cheyenne and Missouri rivers.

To begin to see the prairie, walk away from buildings, power poles, asphalt, away from the sound of motors, away from anything electronic, especially anything that beeps. Walk in the grass that reaches perhaps to your ankles, lithe, whippy grass that has evolved with fewer than 16 inches of moisture a year. Walk until the only sound is the wind combing that grass and the chitter of a flock of horned larks somewhere above and behind you: the invisible birds of the plains. Walk and breathe deeply, inhale clear down to your toes, that clean, indefinable smell of grass that has never known chemical fertilizer, grass that holds man’s fate in its slender stems.

Prairie grass stands close to its ancestors; grass specializes in simplification. Wind-pollinated, grass flowers need no heady fragrance. No honey, no splashy colors. Some grasses do reproduce by flowering, but others spread by underground stems that creep sometimes through the grittiest, grayest, least fertile soil on the planet.

Of all the plants on earth, grass is most important to man. From grass like this evolved all the breadstuff we eat: corn, wheat, oats, rye, barley, rice, sugarcane.”It yields no fruit in earth or air,” said John James Ingalls, a Kansas senator,”and yet should its harvest fail a single year, famine would depopulate the world.” And Rumi, a Sufi mystic who lived from 1207 to 1273, said,”One half the planet is grass. The other half grazing.”

Only standing in undisturbed prairie grass can you truly appreciate prairie sky. Stand tall. Tilt your face to the sky; open your eyes wide. Turn your head from one shoulder to the other, and then turn around and do the same so you can see the whole bowl of blue, frothy with clouds.

Look carefully around you. You should see no sign of habitation. White settlers sensibly put their houses in valleys and low places close to water sources, following the practice of earlier Native residents both for practicality, and for safety from storms. And a low location offered concealment, too, from marauders, from wind. Most ranches in arid country lie down long winding gravel roads from the nearest highway, down in any available dip. Perhaps the house is sheltered by windbreak trees. The corrals are downhill, to protect the water supply.

“Only standing in undisturbed prairie grass can you truly appreciate prairie sky,” writes Hasselstrom. Such prairie can be seen in Harding County.

Only modern settlers are foolish enough, and rich enough, to plunk houses on top of hills. A hilltop house requires a deep well and powerful pumps to bring water to the surface. A house atop a hill must contain a monster furnace to fill it with heat when the thermometer reads 35 below zero and the winds are blowing 50 miles an hour. But most modern residents no longer earn a living from the land, so they situate their houses for the view without realizing that they have doubled, tripled the costs of their own living. They’ve also destroyed the prairie for everyone within sight of their misbegotten lodgings. If anything like this is in sight, walk farther. Use the time to breathe deeply.

The prairie sky. Standing with your eyes open, you must be able to see a harrier hawk rise up from that ridge to the south, wings extended and gleaming bronze in sunlight. Watch her fly, swoop, dip, glide and hover across the face of the ridge and down a half mile to the dam where the ducks scatter under her shadow.

Then the harrier tilts her wings and is lifted by the wind up to soar over your head, turning one eye then the other to see you clearly. Turn your head and watch as she leans first one way then the other against the wind, circling, pitching, angling down along fence lines until finally she drops on a vole or mole in the grass.

Wait. Wait.

The hawk rises, lifts great wings, ascends to the top of a tree at the very edge of your vision. With binoculars you can see the smooth neck bend as she begins to feed on a morsel of prairie life, a morsel of grass made flesh. Like yours.

Breathe deeply. Look around again. A few power poles may trace a lacy filigree at the edges of the blue, and a few trees may gather like seashore foam fringing the blue world overhead. But that’s all. A true prairie sky is clean, without neon, without smog, without the chatter of aircraft. No artificial lights shatter the perfect darkness of the night.

Only with the whole sky as background can you really see the great horned owl drop from the cottonwood near the house, swing around behind the windbreak junipers and alight on the branch of another cottonwood where she instantly looks like a broken-off stump. Only by watching for a long time will you see her glide out over the grass, drop on a rabbit, hold it down with one taloned foot while she turns her head, scouting for danger.

In the whole sky, you can really see the flock of red-winged blackbirds leap out of the cottonwood by the dam, and swing a mile around the hayfield, their gold and red wing patches signaling in the sun. Then they swoop, calling and whistling, into the branches of the two dead cottonwoods by the house. You can see barn swallows demonstrating their daring flying, zipping under the deck of the house, through the broken pane in the barn window, between the bars of the corral gate.

A thunderstorm approaches this otherwise peaceful prairie in Harding County, north of Buffalo.

Only the whole prairie sky allows you to properly see clouds. The Navajo have a proverb:”The clouds must look like many sheep before the rains will come.” Look up: When you see flat-bottomed cumulus clouds with puffy heads arranged as evenly as sheep in a pasture or as tiles on the floor, find your umbrella.

Late in the summer, look forward to the towering cumulus clouds called”cauliflower” because their crowns are boiling upward into blue sky like bubbles in a bathtub. Then watch out for the revealing shape of an anvil against the dark blue: ice crystals building into a thunderstorm likely to bring hail that can flatten a hayfield in minutes, killing birds, rabbits, damaging man’s possessions. After hot days, beware of the pouch-like formations called”mammy” clouds that may signal a tornado.

In the wide prairie sky, you can spot the undulating wing beats from a distance, and watch until they come close enough to identify a great blue heron, flying from the nesting spot on Battle Creek 6 miles to the north to this shrinking pond on the prairie where it will stand on one leg for a few hours while hunting frogs. In summer, the heron may be almost invisible among the crowds of sunflowers along the edges of the pond. In winter, the heron is a cultural icon, a Chinese painting against the silver water as it slowly freezes in the falling snow.

Only the whole sky is large enough so you can hear the shooping and chortling and chuckling of the sandhill cranes miles away. You turn your head this way and that, eyes straining for a sight of the wavering V shapes. Lie down; relax. Let your eyes slide over the sky. There, far to the north, the line thinner than a pencil leaves, growing closer and thicker as the sounds drop to you, hooting and cooing and laughing. The shifting line of birds, mighty wings outstretched, is headed south to gather on the Platte River in Nebraska. Only the whole sky is enough so you can see several V’s of them ó 20, 60, 200 cranes at a time, breaking into groups, circling up the sky until they hit a fast wind that shoots them south, deploying into another ragged arrow shape.

Only the whole sky will hold and amplify the thunder that begins somewhere to the north. The ground shudders as the clouds shimmer: a B-1 bomber takes off from Ellsworth Air Force Base, blasting upward until it is only a silver dot, trailing white vapor into the sunset. Headed perhaps for Iraq, it booms its message of war over this quiet landscape. Only the whole sky allows you to understand the immensity of its power, its importance. Think of it: filled with munitions, and with men and women whose job is to protect this prairie and everything connected to it. Only the whole sky can contain their gallantry, and their work.

The whole sky must be visible for proper appreciation of a sunset. I may be facing east when I notice puffy clouds turning from gray to pink. Instinctively, I look west, where the sunset is supposed to be. It’s there too: golden rays shooting up into the sky or turning the underside of a sky full of clouds pink and gold. When clouds are heavy in the west, sometimes the sunset can’t be seen at all where it should be, and the reflection in the east is so vivid I distrust my sense of direction.

While my mind wrestles with a writing project, I often search for a quotation, a summary, a comforting reminder that someone wiser than I am has considered the same subject. This time, I turned to Henry David Thoreau:”Thank God men cannot fly,” he said,”and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” Oh Henry, did you speak too soon?

The decisions that can protect the prairie sky rest with us. Without the grass, without the harrier and the owl, the whooping cranes and the redwing blackbirds, the prairie can’t exist.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.