Category: outdoors

Posted on by — Leave a comment

High Mountain Gardening

Story and photos by Debra Opland McLane

Crocus in late snow.

To escape stress-filled days of work in Rapid City, my husband and I endure a daily 50-mile round-trip commute to our home on a mile-high mountaintop near Seth Bullock Peak in the central Black Hills. We value our peace and privacy. Neighbors include chipmunks, deer, elk, coyotes, Ponderosa pines and sky. We call our acreage “Southern Exposure.” The sun shines here when it shines nowhere else. And the wind blows, sometimes as a gentle Chinook, sometimes as a blizzard whirlwind.

My mother once sent me a postcard with a greeting that read, “The roots run deep when the winds are strong.” That phrase from Charles Swindall has many meanings, but it could have been written for Black Hills gardeners.

With wind in my thoughts, my high country garden has become a haven for solitude — and a lifelong challenge. As a self-taught botanist, I am educated by books, seed catalogs and garden magazines. I know no fellow mountain gardeners with whom to network. Experience has taught me the most. Bad planting choices are usually fatal. Transplanting is a rare option. Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest rule applies to gardeners, as well as to their plantings. Yet, for those who survive the greatest challenges offer the richest rewards.

An early snow in the garden of Debra Opland McLane’s Southern Exposure acreage in the Black Hills.

Our home rests on a vertical talus slope. If not at the surface, bedrock is reached within 2 inches. Although we reside in the USDA-classified Zone Four, with chaotic weather patterns and little shelter, my plants must meet the minimum requirements of Zone Three. I made several unsuccessful attempts at vegetable gardening, but the early frosts and short growing season limited my choices and time for care. Now, only perennials receive my undivided attention.

Plant selection is best dictated by xeriscaping — using environmental protection, water conservation and native plants, and building wildlife habitats for dry climates. Xeriscaping acknowledges the restraints of a 5,922-foot altitude, northern latitude, minus 33-degree January lows, annual rainfall of 15 inches and a 150-day growing season. We battle the bone-chilling gusts of winterkill, acidic soils, hungry deer, instantaneous drainage and late-spring and early-fall frosts. To all these demands, I have added another personal qualification.

Whether planning in winter or sowing in spring, my garden serves as my exercise gym, psychologist’s couch and meditative church pew. I want each plant to grow with deep roots and deep meaning.

At first examination, my virgin rock pile seemed formidable. How should I begin? That year, my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary. What should I give them? The two problems melded into one solution.

Married beside a lilac hedgerow on a prairie homestead near Ipswich, my parents weathered as many storms as those shrubs. To honor their golden years, I planted lilacs the length of my driveway. These old-fashioned shrubs have proven their pioneer hardiness. Spring frosts act as welcome moisture on buds, and deer assist with pruning. The Ipswich lilacs gave me hope that my botanical efforts might not only survive, but also thrive, beyond my lifetime. They also gave me a theme for my garden.

Wild lamb’s ear with frost.

I choose foundation trees and shrubs, and all perennials, for durability, but also for relevance to an important person or event in my life. Buried in love, each planting expresses joy or copes with loss. If tender seedlings take deep root against the ravages of their first growing season, they are doubly blessed.

My fittest survivor, the Hawthorn tree, Crataegus toba, was named after the Greek word kratos, meaning strength. A formidable and impenetrable windbreak hedge, the trees surround our home, protecting my family. They symbolize the binding trust of a marriage that’s endured life’s normal tribulations, not to mention a business partnership. The first season, my original Crataegus bloomed with fragrant, pink-tipped, double-white flowers. Fall fruits attract birds, and warped trunks provide winter texture. We plant more Hawthorns every spring.

Surrounding each Hawthorn rests a bed of peonies. When my ancestors homesteaded in eastern South Dakota, the first plantings included peonies. As they graced every doorway and kitchen table of my childhood, I have memories of their intoxicating fragrance. First cultivated in Tibet, individual plants may live 100 years or longer. Preferring fall sowing, they relieve my spring chores, and the deer hate them. A deer once spit one out. It lay bare-rooted on the ground, happily sprouting new growth.

My father-in-law always gave me rock-solid advice. So his plant needed a foundation spot. At 87, his stubborn Scottish spirit never seemed to fail, though his body weakened. He walked with a diamond willow cane. I chose the Coryills avellana contorta — Harry Lauder’s walking stick. A perfect winter interest, its twisted branches imitate the cane carried by the old-time Scottish comedian. Slow growing and carefree, this Zone Four plant needs extra mulch, sunshine and TLC. I fertilize with a dose of Grandpa Mac’s indomitable spirit.

Tiger lily.

A graceful, beautiful woman, my mother-in-law favored the wild, pink rose that blooms in the Black Hills each summer. Like most wild varieties, they do not transplant well. Instead, I’ve discovered the wonders of Rosa rugosas. From bare-root plants, these rugged roses bloomed in their first season. Although such gems grow in many beds, I specially tend the ones near the Corylus, entwining “her” stems through “his” crooked branches.

Hardy only to Zone Four, I killed many chrysanthemums, my daughter’s birth flower. Reflecting her independent spirit and youthful simplicity, wildflowers and native grasses became a successful alternative. My most difficult dry ditches bloom not only with native dame’s rockets, gold yarrow, lamb’s ears, goldenrod, and black-eyed Susans, but also with imported Mexican hat, coreopsis, catchfly, wallflowers, blue flax, Maximilian sunflowers, ox-eyed daisies and monarda.

My stepchildren moved to Phoenix several years ago. That summer I avenged our sorrow by beating dirt into beds shaped like teardrops falling down terraced slopes. Here, I discovered that dianthus, or sweet William, and bleeding hearts can tolerate sunshine. By fall, I transplanted purple iris from the garden at my husband’s boyhood home. Forty years before, his mother had brought them from her hometown. As guardian angels, at the center I planted colchicum, meadow saffron. Greek mythology says the flower sprang from the spilled elixir Medea administered to dying Jason. Adding flowers each spring, the blossoms bring me closer to my adopted children.

True friendship has graced me but a few times. My best woman friend now lives far too many miles away. With her architect’s attention to detail, it was she who first taught me the beauty of perennial gardening. Her beds always included forsythia. Tested at experimental stations in North and South Dakota, the meadowlark variety has proven bud-hardy to -35 degrees. Meadowlark hedgerows brighten both entryways.

Every garden should have something borrowed. Through the windows of my childhood home, we watched our neighbor’s garden grow. Along with pounds of rich loam, I’ve transplanted her cuttings of bishop’s weed, snow-on-the-mountain, lady ferns and patriot hostas. The transplants are now in need of transplanting. Mrs. Christianson passed away and, to my horror, the renter piled garbage on her garden. I was so grateful I had rescued part of it.

The view from Southern Exposure.

Chosen for myself, each year I sow special plants for every season. Spring bloomers include snowdrops, winter aconite, and johnny jump-ups. I cherish one early blossom above the others. During a Mother’s Day walk, I stepped on a tiny purple bud. Hidden by pine needles, pasqueflowers, our state flower, filled the woodland slopes. Whether budding among natural kinnikinnick vines or sown red sedum, this anemone highlights my rock gardens.

Summer choices are limitless — from oriental poppies to winter-hardy Gladiolus nanus, from lupines to Gaillardia grandiflora. Among these, lilies became my favorites. As natural-blooming secrets, day lilies are rare mountain surprises, but Asiatic hybrids are my true delights. Flowering longer, each bloom expresses the depth of Eastern philosophy. Fragrant or not, their names reflect their beauty: expression, con amore, dreamland, stargazer and grand paradiso. With perfect timing, all varieties bud just as spring fades.

Uncommon but exceptional, fall bloomers survive when all else has died. Sedum autumn joy flowers in early snowfalls. Budding from the top down, the unique Lialris spicata impresses me, as well as the butterflies. Outside, it lasts into early September. Inside, it is preserved in dried arrangements.

White glad.

Perfect choices in good drainage, bulbs are the interlocking threads throughout my beds. In honor of Wales, daffodils naturalize every hillside. Quite by accident, I discovered that deer despise “daffs” as much as they adore tulips. In her garden, my daughter designed a bed shaped like Simba’s face. King Alfred daffodils symbolized the fur. For cheeks, we used Princess Irene tulips, my mother’s namesake variety. The deer could not endure the putrid smell of the daffs to chow down on their favorite food group. Throughout the garden, Grandma’s tulips were the only survivors.

Although my successes are thrilling, my failures are equally disappointing. I’ve lost hydrangea, a golden hinoki cypress, purple fringe smoke trees, thuja, shamrock hollies, skyrocket junipers and hyacinths. Planted for my father, a Norway spruce needed much more moisture than I could provide. I am still looking for a Scandinavian replacement.

Whether reasons for failure are deer or drought, winterkill or illiterate mistakes, I learn as much from errors as from accomplishments. I am continually behind in designing, landscaping and planting; life proceeds faster than time, or budgeting. This year, our family witnessed two births and a wedding. Last August, a dear friend died of cancer. Grandpa Mac passed away in March, as did his Corylus.

Like anything worthwhile, deep roots and deep feelings do not come easy. I’m training myself to take one day at a time — one trench for irrigation and one load of compost, one shovel of dirt and one teardrop of moisture.

During a winter-sunshine day, my daughter and I plodded along on yet another rock wall. She stopped and said, “Hey mommy, me and you — we’re making a view!” When I reach my rocking chair years, I can only hope she has inherited the strong heart necessary to face the winds of change. I promise to give her deep roots.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Coldlands Beauty

By Katie Hunhoff

The Badlands are a solitary destination even in temperate seasons, but frigid temperatures ensure more privacy. Photographer Carl Johnson likes the Badlands for its seclusion, in summer or winter.

Johnson has explored the Badlands since he was a kid living in Rapid City. Now a professional photographer in Anchorage, Alaska, he still comes home to photograph and explore the unique landscape.

His fascination with the Badlands grew from his early interest in paleontology and mineralogy. He searched canyons and gullies throughout the Black Hills for rocks and fossils. At age 10 he showed some of his finds to the professors at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

“It’s an island of strangeness in the middle of the prairie, and so unique and isolated. Once you’re there, there are so many unique places to go off the road system of the park. It’s an otherworldly place you can explore for the sake of exploring or to get your creative juices flowing. It’s great for inspiration.”

Johnson’s forays in the Badlands, and other favorite haunts like Black Elk Peak and Grizzly Bear Creek fostered a love for wild places. Photography came, unexpectedly, when he joined the Navy after high school. He began working as a photojournalist while serving as ship’s photographer for the U.S.S. Haleakala and U.S.S. David R. Ray, photographing everything from re-enlistment ceremonies to missile firings. He continued taking photos while attending the University of Minnesota. A stint working at the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota got him interested nature photography.

He admits that as a youngster, he didn’t fully appreciate the benefits of solitude in the outdoors. Years later he read Whitman, Thoreau and Sigurd Olson.”They made me think about the outdoors in ways that hadn’t occurred to me, and it changed how I see wilderness and what I do with my photography.”

When searching for Badlands wildlife Johnson doesn’t just capture an image, but tries to understand and picture the animal in the place where it lives.”You see things more holistically when you combine that understanding with a photographic vision,” he says.

The wide-open spaces in the Badlands don’t provide a lot of cover while searching for wildlife.”A lot of it is just luck. For example, I was photographing some rolling hills and looked over and saw a coyote,” he says.”Otherwise, a lot of it is understanding the subject and how to behave. And the luck factor, that’s important.”

Johnson recently married an Anchorage native, Michelle. His family has left South Dakota, but he still returns home to the Badlands.”There is something wild and open and inviting there,” he says.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Rails to Trails

By Paul Higbee

The Mickelson Trail follows the old Burlington Northern railroad line through the Black Hills. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

For nearly a century, trains thundered along this north-south route. Passing over high railway trestles and through canyons, tunnels and the very heart of the Black Hills, they hauled passengers, freight and coal for Homestake Mine’s boilers.

Then the trains stopped rolling. Three years later, in the summer of 1986, Guy Edwards, a former state legislator and then city councilman in Rapid City, got word that someone was tearing down old trestles along the route with a chainsaw. He was asked if someone could investigate the possibility of converting the Burlington Northern rail line to recreational use under the federal Rails to Trails Act.

The 109-mile long trail includes more than 100 converted railroad bridges and four rock tunnels. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

Edwards agreed to make a couple phone calls. Eventually he made about 5,000. He also spent a lot of his time and money. But a dozen years after the trail first was proposed, the final sections opened in the fall of 1998.

Known as the Mickelson Trail, the route once reserved for trains has become the domain of hikers, bicyclists and horseback riders. Its 109 miles are almost guaranteed to bring people face to face with deer, porcupines and wild turkeys. Spotting an elk or mountain goat isn’t uncommon. Neither is spying towns since the trail connects to destinations that all Black Hills people know — Deadwood, Hill City, Custer — as well as lesser known places like Dumont, Mystic and Pringle.

Though it’s not far from the more rugged Centennial Trail, which runs parallel to the Mickelson a few miles east, this trail is accessible to those unable to consider a strenuous hike. The grade never exceeds 4 percent. The surface is a smooth layer of crushed limestone. Promoters say perhaps short sections might be paved someday, allowing those in wheelchairs to experience a few miles under their own power.

Among the project’s first supporters was George Mickelson, who had served in the legislature with Edwards. Mickelson came through with an early $50 contribution, and was elected governor just weeks after Edwards began organizing. The governor actively supported the effort during his administration, and after his 1993 death the trail was named in his honor.

Supporters, though, seemed in short supply early on. “Probably 95 percent of property owners along the trail were against us at first,” Edwards says.”I could understand their position. After years of having trains go by their property, it appeared the corridor might quietly meld into the landscape when the line was abandoned.”

In some cases, Burlington Northern was preparing to transfer land leases to adjacent property owners. In other cases, the railway never held the properties, but had easements as long as the line wasn’t abandoned. Some property owners hoped for more privacy, and some had come up with development plans. When Edwards and fellow trail proponent Dick Lee appeared at meetings to discuss their project, they often faced 50 angry property owners. Especially vivid in Edwards’ memory is an older man who visited him, almost teary, to say he’d worked on a development project for two years. But Burlington Northern wouldn’t complete the property transfer, that man told Edwards, “because of a commitment they made to you.”

The trail surface is mostly crushed limestone and gravel and includes 15 trailheads between Edgemont and Deadwood. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism.

The opponents, Edwards says, “put up a valiant, cohesive, well organized attempt to block the trail. They were good people. After five or six years, the opposition faded away.”

It faded as Edwards and his supporters successfully argued that the line hadn’t been abandoned. True, Burlington Northern was granted permission by the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop running trains, but trail supporters believed a rail line itself can’t be considered abandoned unless the courts or Congress say so.

“When you look at federal laws related to railways, and easements for railways, you’re looking at stacks of reading,” Edwards says. “There aren’t many fields where there’s been more federal legislation.”

All that reading paid off. The courts agreed the line wasn’t abandoned. “Everyone thinks of Rails to Trails projects as primarily recreation,” Edwards says. “But there’s more to them than that. This is a means of keeping established public corridors in existence. A hundred years ago there was an economic need for the Black Hills corridor, and a hundred years in the future there may be another need for it that we can’t even guess now. Meanwhile, we’re using it for recreation.”

The late Gov. George Mickelson was one of the trail’s early supporters.

He cites a rail corridor in Los Angeles that the city gave up when it appeared that trucking was driving freight trains to extinction. Later the city had to recreate the corridor at a tremendous cost.

Successfully arguing for the corridor, of course, was just the beginning of the work. Volunteers raised money and decked and railed old trestles. On board climbed an impressive coalition of federal, state, and private organizations: the National Guard supplied labor over the years, as would state Department of Corrections trustees. The U.S. Forest Service, state departments of Game, Fish and Parks and transportation, private building contractors and Burlington Northern all played key roles.

Burlington Northern, in fact, grew so supportive that it relinquished all its interest along the route — land, trestles, other wood that could have been salvaged — for just $20,000. The project expanded north to south: Deadwood to Hill City, Hill City to Custer, Custer to Edgemont. By the third phase, Custer to Edgemont, Burlington Northern had become so involved that it donated everything and became the first operating railroad to take a leadership role in invoking federal Rails to Trails status.

“The cooperation between individuals and agencies, all of whom have made this a high priority, has been amazing to see,” says Harley Noem, West River regional manager for Game, Fish and Parks’ Division of Parks and Recreation.

For three years prior to its opening, the trail was a big part of Noem’s life. Prior to 1998, about half the trail was open. Trail completion meant a busy summer spent refurbishing trestles and two tunnels, in addition to surfacing and culvert work. Another massive job, taken on by a Department of Corrections crew, was building fences in compliance with adjacent landowners’ needs. There are about 300 landowners, some of whom required barbed wire fences for cattle, or smooth wire for horses, or even wooden privacy fences for cabins.

Although developed for non-motorized travel, there are some winter exceptions, with stretches designated for snowmobilers. Trail towns have seen new businesses, such as bed and breakfasts and cycle shops, catering to trail users. But Black Hills residents and visitors alike see the most benefits. They see the countryside from a new perspective as they watch landscapes pass by slowly and quietly.

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

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Burnt Hills

By Edward Raventon

Smoking hills of sulfuric acid emissions can still be found along the Missouri River in south-central South Dakota, but they should be approached with extreme caution.

In the late 1790s fantastic stories of burning hills and volcanoes on the upper Missouri were often repeated in the small village of St. Louis. Since only a handful of superstitious French voyagers had ever ventured that far up river, speculation was rampant as to what caused hills to burn, or if any such phenomena even existed.

Les Cotes Brulees, French for the Burnt Hills, bordered the west side of the Missouri River in Lyman and Gregory counties and covered an area stretching some 75 river miles from Scalp Creek (10 miles north of Fort Randall) to the mouth of American Crow Creek, (just south of Oacoma) with the heart of the smoldering activity centered at the mouth of White River.

This is an area of dark, gumbo hills with cut banks that drop precipitously to the river. The cut banks expose stratified layers of blackish gray Pierre shale, a petrified mud deposited millions of years ago by a shallow inland sea that once covered the western interior of South Dakota.

Interspersed amidst this 75-mile strip of rolling hills and bluffs are crevices in the earth that once emitted poisonous plumes of sulfuric acid, smoke and steam. Since the landscape features smoke and steam along with many bare shale outcrops that lack vegetation, the early voyageurs might naturally have assumed the charred looking hills had been burned by fires, some of which were still smoldering.

In St. Louis, Lewis and Clark had certainly heard the stories and from their journal entries it is evident that they were most eager to investigate this phenomena. On August 24, 1804, four and a half months out of St. Louis, they got their first look at a smoldering bluff along the Missouri River, about 8 miles below the mouth of the Vermillion River on the Nebraska side.

Clark described the bluff as 180 to 190 feet high noting that “it appeared to have been recently on fire.” He reported that the crevice was so hot they could not keep their hands in it. There was no fire or flame Clark reported, just searing heat and acrid fumes.

Captain Lewis, who had apparently remained longer than the rest of the party to make further observations, became ill after returning to the boat. Clark noted in his journal that Lewis was “obliged to take strong medicine to relieve the effects of the fumes.”

Scientists later discovered that the fumes Meriwether Lewis had inhaled consisted of sulfuric acid, which in large doses can seriously injure the lungs. The explorers referred to the toxic minerals from this bluff by the generic name of “cobalt” and through deductive reasoning, surmised that it accounted for the stomach disorders that plagued many members of the crew since passing the mouth of the Big Sioux River.

Clark noted that the crew had been in the habit of scooping its drinking water from the surface of the Missouri. However, after their timely discovery of the poisonous “minerals,” Lewis ordered the crew to take water from a greater depth and to agitate the water and dispense the foam and scum. The result was that some of their stomach disorders ceased while the boils that had afflicted the men completely disappeared. Lewis’ illness proved to be the key in identifying and alleviating the poisoning of the Corps of Discovery.

This was the only observation of smoldering outcrops that the explorers chronicled in their journals, suggesting that the “fires” in the Burnt Hills farther upstream were dormant that late summer of 1804.

In 1839, 35 years after the Corps of Discovery went up the Missouri, the Burnt Hills were again the subject of intense curiosity and investigation. This time the observer was the eminent 19th century French geographer and geologist Joseph Nicollet, who was able to travel in style, taking advantage of a Missouri River steamboat to make the long, arduous journey north.

Nicollet had been well educated in his native France and was a seasoned explorer, traveler and naturalist. He was also familiar with South Dakota, having only a few years earlier made the first scientific observations of the glacial topography of the rolling hills (Coteau des Prairies) of eastern South Dakota. In fact Nicollet, along with his naturalist assistant, John Fremont (The Pathfinder who would later win fame as a western explorer), had been the first to chisel his initials into the Sioux quartzite at the famous Pipestone Quarry in southwestern Minnesota as a lasting signature of that expedition.

Nicollet, always a keen observer of his surroundings, had begun his study of Les Cotes Brulees long before he saw them. In St. Louis he had chanced to pick up several pumice-like stones he found lying washed up on the levee. He correctly theorized that the stones were formed by an intense combustion process inside the earth and further deduced that this process had dissolved (burned) the substances filling the pores of the pumice stones, transforming them into cinders light enough to float down the Missouri.

“I don’t believe volcanoes are the answer,” he wrote in his diary, “but I do not intend to lose sight of this phenomenon as we approach the place of its origin.

On June 3, 1839, while hiking near Scalp Butte (north of present Fort Randall), Nicollet got his first good look at the Burnt Hills. In his diary he makes this entry:

“We begin to encounter black or burnt hills as they are called by travelers, thus originating the idea, often contracted, then revived that there are volcanoes in these parts ….

“It seems the subterranean regions of this zone sometime burn due to some reason or other and a thick smoke can be seen rising from the peaks and domes. It is a quiet smoke, there is no flame and it lasts for years. Travelers have indicated where they saw it and these places are easily recognized by the outward signs left by those that most recently burned ….

“When the combustion does go out in these smoldering furnaces provided by nature, the excavations that result from them cause ground depressions and sometimes tremendous cave-ins whence originate these deep trenches and pitfalls that are characteristics of this black zone compared to other parts of the slopes. The heat generated by these smolderings is hardly felt on the surface of the ground. There are not traces of fusion … or of any thing that might have flowed out of, been projected or carried out (of the ground). The crust of the ground is simply blackened and can no longer entertain any vegetation.”

Nicollet later theorized that the smoldering phenomenon was due to the meeting of shale and overlying coal beds that had been ignited by spontaneous combustion or lightning and other means. He gave these smoldering crevices an inaccurate and clumsy name of “pseudo-volcanoes.”

One of the most extensive prehistoric burn areas occurred near the mouth of the White River. Here, within a 5-mile radius, there is evidence of at least five smoldering pits. The red-baked cinder outcrops found here confirm that the pits once burned long and hot. This phenomenon undoubtedly created a sensation among the earliest Indians, beginning first with the Ree and later the Sioux. It probably accounts for the old Sioux name, Manki-Zatah for the White River. Manki-Zatah means Smoke Earth.

Today geologists have ruled out speculation that lightning strikes or prairie fires ignited Nicollet’s pseudo-volcanoes. The best scientific explanation for this phenomena of smoldering pits is based on the fact that some of the shale deposits along the Missouri contain oil, making the rocks carbonaceous and therefore flammable. Some of these rocks also contain sulfide minerals which are known for their spontaneous oxidation and combustion.

The combination of these minerals and their properties results in a complex interaction whereby the sulfides (pyrite and marcasite) interact with oil shale, air, water and possibly bacteria in creating a spontaneous combustion that, as Nicollet and early steamboat pilots noted, can keep these sites smoldering two or three years if conditions are right.

After the pits are fired up the heat in them, while subtle, can become extremely intense. Geologists, using indirect methods of measurement, estimated that interior bum temperatures deep within the crevice can reach a whopping 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures just below the surface of the gas vents can be 760 degrees, or about three times the boiling point of water.

However even these hot, poisonous pits in the earth have a delicate, fragile side to them. Geologists have found tiny, yellow sulfur crystals around the edges of some of the crevices. These crystals are formed near the vents where they precipitate out of the clouds of acrid smoke when it hits the cooler atmosphere.

Lewis and Clark’s historic “volcano hill” has now all but disappeared; a victim of nearly 190 years of river flooding and erosion. Most of the other bum areas near the river between Fort Randall and Chamberlain are either extinct or have been dormant for decades waiting for the proper mix of ingredients for activation.

Note: A few burn sites continue to be active on an irregular basis. One of the most recently active areas is near the Platte-Winner bridge both on the east and the west side of the Missouri. In the summer of 2015, one site was easily visible from the bridge looking south on the west side of the river and is best seen from a boat.

For those interested in seeing these sites, maps and other historical information on this area is available at the Snake Creek Recreation Area.

One final word of caution: Burn sites are dangerously unstable when dormant and hellishly hot and noxious when active. They are best viewed from a far safe distance.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 1992 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Opening Day

By Bernie Hunhoff

Teenagers who help at Louise’s Cafe in Fairfax, population 115, are about to get a lesson in communications. That’s one of several side benefits to the hunting season for Gregory County, in the heart of pheasant country.

“I keep telling the kids that they’ll get better tips if they just learn to talk to the hunters a little bit,” says Louise Truax, who has been frying eggs on Fairfax’s Main Street for 30 years.”They joke with you and you joke back.'”

Louise’s Cafe, with its $6.50 breakfast special (eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast and coffee) spices the Gregory County ambiance, along with dozens of other small town restaurants, shops and lodges.

Marge LaFave has run the tiny and impeccably clean Hertz Motel in Bonesteel, population 100, for nearly 40 years. Even though most of the pheasants have migrated west of her little town, hunters still sleep there. Across the street is the historic TeePee Cafe, managed by Tami Jons who features Friday night steak specials, prime rib on Saturdays and Sunday breakfast buffets. The motel and cafe were built in the 1950s in anticipation of the lake traffic everybody thought would flood Highway 18 once Fort Randall Dam filled Lake Francis Case.

Walleye and anglers have taken to the lake, but ring-necked roosters take precedence in October when the sorghum heads turn red and the sumac even redder. Pheasants are a $250 million industry statewide. More than 170,000 hunters will be gunning for the birds this fall. That creates 4,500 jobs for guides, taxidermists, waiters, bartenders and lodge-keepers in the four very small towns (Fairfax, Herrick, Bonesteel and Dallas) and two small cities (Burke and Gregory) that comprise Gregory County. Churches hold bake sales to capitalize on the hunters, and the city of Gregory celebrates with a soup-tasting contest.

Opening Day has a fresh aura, especially in Gregory County where an autumn blue sky is beautifully framed by the muted, earthy colors of cornfields, grasslands and tree belts. Hunters regularly remark that they wouldn’t care if they never saw a pheasant, so lovely are the landscapes.

“It’s more about the relationships and the camaraderie,” says Mike Karbo, who bought the funeral home in Burke 20 years ago and moved from Sioux Falls because he loved the outdoors. He says deer, turkey and walleye are also big draws.

And did we mention pancakes?”I’ve been using the same mix forever,” says Louise, the Fairfax restaurateur.”It’s just milk and butter and the mix and you add water, but they sure like them.”

Then add syrup.”I always tell the kids that when the customer gets ready to pay, all you have to say is ‘have a good day,'” she says.”Some of them do and some don’t. But that’s ok, too.”

Who wouldn’t want to hunt in a place like this?

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Saving Our Native Prairie

By Jerry Wilson

Some ranchers protect native grasses for their exquisite beauty, but they also know of the prairie’s nutritional value.

I sprawl in tall prairie grasses on the Missouri River bluff, and inhale the purity of the universe. Big bluestem, Indian and switch grasses, still lustrous in winter, waltz in the wind six feet above my head. In their shadow glint purplish hues of little bluestem, the amber of sideoats grama and the drying heads of wild flowers.

From ground level this seems a vast jungle of grass, but in fact it is an isolated handful of acres, a remnant of the million square miles of wild prairie that 150 years ago stretched from Canada to Texas, including most of South Dakota. Two centuries ago Meriwether Lewis stood nearby and marveled at 3,000 bison in a single herd.

How did these grasses survive? The roots of prairie plants may reach 12 feet down, safe from drought and able to survive decades of overgrazing and chemical warfare. By weight, more than two-thirds of many native grasses are subterranean. In the 1930s, University of Nebraska ecologist Frederic Clements excavated a half-square-yard of prairie grass, and from the earth extracted 150 miles of root.

It would be a rare half-yard of earth that contained the roots of a single plant. More likely, in any scrap of native prairie, half a dozen grasses and forbs — broadleaf plants — would be in reach. That is by design.”The old prairie lived by the diversity of its plants and animals, all of which were useful because the sum total of their cooperations and competitions achieved continuity,” said Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

The goal of modern farming is to replace that diversity with monoculture. Whatever is not corn or soybeans or the other chosen seed, is a weed. After 150 years of plowing, just two percent of the tallgrass prairie that once dominated eastern South Dakota remains, and the mixed and shortgrass prairies of our west are disappearing fast. Will we lose the last vestiges of wild prairie? Does it really matter? Is it possible to save some of what remains, and perhaps to restore and rehabilitate some of what we have lost?

In his autobiography A Son of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland recalled his pioneering family’s arrival on the South Dakota prairie, and the first order of business:”At last the wide ‘quarter section’ lay upturned, black to the sun and the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed.”

Linda Hasselstrom developed an appreciation for native prairie while growing up on the family ranch near Hermosa.”A lot of people would die for the mountains,” she says.”What we need are people willing to die — or at least fight — for the prairies.” Photo by Greg Latza.

In geological time, the age of America’s prairie is actually brief, a mere 10,000 years, the hundreds of grasses and flowering forbs evolving as the glaciers of the last ice age retreated. And yet in a fleeting fraction of that time, what nature wove has been undone.”The more we love this place as it is, the more we feel the pain of what it so recently was,” says Candace Savage in her book Prairie: A Natural History.”The wild prairie ecosystem is gone. And this tragedy is compounded by the realization that we don’t know exactly what it is that we have lost.”

In fact, the question wasn’t even asked until 1916, when Frederic Clements, focusing on the ability of native prairie to recover after fire, realized that prairie is a self-healing system, a community of plants and other organisms with regenerative power, the ability to reassert themselves, as Savage puts it, in an”orderly sequence, each wave creating the conditions required by the next, until the vegetation reached a stable configuration, or ‘climax’.” Clements recognized nearly a century ago what we today know as an”ecosystem.” But for regeneration to occur, modern man must provide minimal help — and then step aside.

My family and I arrived on the Missouri Valley bluff a century after the first settlers, Nels and Martha Oakland, took the land. Under terms of the Homestead Act, the Oaklands had five years to”prove up,” to plow so many acres and make other”improvements” to earn the land. About 1875, Nels hitched a one-bottom plow to a team of mules, and inch by inch, turned the waving heads of native diversity under. Even if he had wished to let the grasses grow and fatten his cows, he had no choice. The Homestead Act required that he plow his hilly land.

To pay interest on borrowed money and somehow survive on 160 acres of marginal land, the Oaklands no doubt took all the soil could give. Each season, inconsequential handfuls of topsoil washed away. Perhaps in his 37th and last spring, Nels’ plow still turned up darkish earth. Perhaps he didn’t know that the life-giving layer above clay and glacial debris had worn dangerously thin. But I suspect he knew that his generation was both a beginning and an end.

Thirty years ago we found the Oaklands’ hills depleted and eroded, producing imported grasses and weeds. One spring I stripped a handful of big bluestem seed, spaded a plot behind the home we’d built, and began a small experiment in prairie restoration. Two decades later we have restored 30 acres of prairie — in so far as that is possible — and are working to rehabilitate 30 more. And we are not alone. Alongside the rapid conversion of prairie to commodity crops, scores of South Dakotans are at work preserving and restoring native grasses and flowers.

Across the state, and particularly west of the Missouri River, conscientious ranchers still zealously protect the prairie. Perhaps some are motivated by the exquisite beauty of wildflowers in spring and the bronze and purple hues of prairie grasses in fall. Some protect native grasses and forbs because they know the plants that evolved on our sometimes unforgiving plains survive the fiercest cold and drought our climate can deal. But ranchers also know the superior nutritional value of native prairie for growing the most healthful meat.

The Mortensons have been rehabbing the native prairie for 60 years on their sprawling ranch northwest of Pierre. Cattle now graze where corn was grown.

The prairie has many friends — ranchers whose grandfathers homesteaded the land and who would sooner cut off an arm than plow under the legacy of 10,000 years, scientists, soil conservationists, hunters and fishermen who know that prairie produces wildlife, and city folk who plant tiny scraps of prairie in their backyards because its beauty thrills.

Many South Dakotans are familiar with the books of Linda Hasselstrom and Dan O’Brien. Hasselstrom grew up amidst her father’s Herefords near Hermosa; O’Brien raises bison on his ranch by the Cheyenne River. Both honor and defend the prairie ecosystem and the ranching way of life.”A lot of people would die for the mountains,” Hasselstrom says in Going Over East.”What we need are people willing to die — or at least fight — for the prairies.”

On the Pine Ridge Reservation near Allen, the Lakota buffalo herd thrives on intact native prairie. On the Mortenson ranch northwest of Pierre, Todd, Jeff and Curt Mortenson raise cattle on native grasses they and their father, Clarence, have maintained in good health for many decades. Clarence began rehabilitating his ranch’s natural ecosystem 60 years ago, combating erosion with sediment-trapping dams and revitalizing native prairie with rotational grazing. Gradually native vegetation reestablished itself and wildlife returned. Ecologically-conscious management increased both profits and sustainability.

Recent decades have seen the flowering of numerous private organizations devoted to preserving native prairie. Ranchers and conservationists of the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition, for example, provide scientific information on the virtues of native ecosystems, the conservation and management of grazing lands, and ways to exploit the prairie’s economic potential without compromising its health. The South Dakota Art Museum in Brookings and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raise money for prairie preservation by selling prints of Harvey Dunn’s famous painting, The Prairie Trail.

Among the prairie’s oldest friends is The Nature Conservancy, a nationwide organization founded in 1951″to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.” The largest South Dakota grassland under TNC management is the 7,800-acre Ordway Prairie, 50 miles northwest of Aberdeen.

The Ordway ecosystem includes over 300 plant species, says manager Mary Miller, from tall grasses and wetland species to short grasses on hilltops. Hillsides bloom with wildflowers from late spring through summer. Ordway’s fauna is also diverse, including badgers, ground squirrels, foxes, coyotes and 280 bison. TNC simulates nature’s management strategy, periodic controlled burns followed by grazing bison, a progression that for millennia kept prairie healthy. Surplus grass-fed bison are sold each year. Bio-control agents — insects that feed on specific invasive weeds — allow managers to limit chemical use.

The importance of the TNC preserve grows as surrounding prairie faces conversion to agriculture, heavy grazing pressure and invasive species. The preserve’s 400 wetlands provide nesting for thousands of waterfowl, shorebirds, grebes, rails and herons, while numerous grassland birds inhabit the mixed grass prairie.

Northern Prairies Land Trust takes another approach to preservation of native prairie and other vulnerable special lands. The non-profit conservation organization was established in 1999 to safeguard unique ecosystems of the Northern Great Plains by helping South Dakota and Nebraska landowners conserve lands for habitat preservation, agriculture, ranching, water, cultural and historical resources. NPLT has protected nearly 20,000 acres of unbroken tallgrass prairie in over 25 perpetual conservation easements.

Serious threats to the nation’s bird species highlight the urgency of conservation, says NPLT president John Davidson. According to a recent U.S. Interior Department report, nearly one-third of the nation’s 800 bird species are endangered, threatened, or in significant decline, including 46 grassland breeding birds, many of which depend on native grasslands for survival.

Bluestem now grows on writer Jerry Wilson’s Clay County farm. He has restored 30 acres of prairie and is working on 30 more.

Davidson also emphasizes the value of perennial grasses as”a stable repository of carbon. Grasses store carbon quickly,” he says,”providing an immediate mitigation against global warming.” Besides destroying habitat, plowing prairie releases stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, protecting native grasslands can be financially profitable, since high quality grazing and hay production increase ranchers’ income.”The key to prairie conservation,” Davidson says,”is the sustainability of the ranching economy and culture.”

Private conservation and restoration efforts are assisted by federal entities like the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which pays landowners to restore grasses to floodplains and other marginal lands, and the National Forest Service, which 50 years ago set aside three sections of South Dakota’s shortgrass prairie as the Oglala, Fort Pierre and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. Now Sen. Tim Johnson is taking the prairie protection effort to another level. If enacted, Johnson’s SB 3310 will designate 48,000 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands between the Badlands and the Black Hills as the first federal grasslands wilderness, in honor of outdoorsman and conservation advocate Tony Dean, who died in 2008. Wilderness designation provides long-term protection of a key ecosystem, while allowing multiple private and public uses to continue.

Noble and important as all these preservation efforts are, they may not be enough to balance the loss of prairie. Saving prairie also requires restoration, work that can occur on a landscape scale only if farmers and ranchers can make a living by replanting prairie while simultaneously freeing themselves and taxpayers from dependency on annual crop subsidies. That is what South Dakota State University ecology professor Carter Johnson and three colleagues hope to demonstrate on the EcoSun Prairie Farm southwest of Brookings.

The 640-acre project is funded by the Sun Grant Center at SDSU, whose mission is biofuels research. But Johnson and his colleagues have a broader mission, to demonstrate the economic and ecological sustainability of a working prairie farm. They leased the land from Bill Lee, curator of the Ag Heritage Museum in Brookings, who restored the big Case and other tractors at the museum and who still lives on the farm.

The farm was typical for the region — most of the wetlands drained, 400 acres in corn and soybeans, the rest in non-native pasture grasses. The Mortenson brothers will bring yearlings from their Stanley County ranch to the cool season pasture in spring, then move them to EcoSun’s native grasses in summer to produce grass-fed beef. The 400 acres of cropland are being restored to the native plants best suited to the particular terrain, hydrology and soil type of each field.

The idea was to develop”strategic mixtures,” diverse native species the conservationists think will have value for seed, pasture, hay or biofuels, and thus to maintain an income stream; if the price of one commodity is low, perhaps another will be up. Using their soil conservation district’s grass drill, researchers planted the first 60 acres of switchgrass and 40 acres of a 15-species bluestem mix in 2008. They also gathered 8,000 plugs of prairie cordgrass to plant three acres of wetland.

That fall professors and students hand harvested seed and started more cordgrass to transplant the next spring. In 2009 they added 30 acres of big bluestem and other warm-season native grasses and flowering forbs and renovated 10 acres of Conservation Reserve land. 2010 saw the largest planting, 150 acres, including 100 acres of mixed grasses and forbs, another 40 acres of renovated CRP and 10 acres of switchgrass. The last hundred acres of cropland will be converted this year, a mixture of at least 100 native species, using seed harvested from The Nature Conservancy’s remnant of unplowed prairie two miles away.

Progress is documented in several ways, including production records, a video taken from an ultra-light airplane, a feature-length documentary film produced by Carter’s sons, Tellef and Tor, and a time lapse video of the 40-acre mixed species field. One shot was taken every 20 minutes from June to September, so each three seconds of video illustrate 24 hours of growth and flowering.

A major economic advantage of perennial prairie grasses is that once established, annual inputs are minimal; typically no tillage, pesticides or fertilizer are required. Some plots may not gross as much as corn, but corn inputs can cost $400 per acre. The group can harvest switchgrass seed worth $3 per pound and four tons per acre of big bluestem hay worth up to $400.

To many farmers, wetlands are a nuisance to be drained. Johnson sees them as an opportunity.”Instead of draining and planting corn, we are planting things where they belong,” he said.”There are no sub-optimal conditions. We are using the water to grow harvestable wetland grasses instead of draining it toward the Gulf of Mexico full of nitrates.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has helped fund restoration of the farm’s 35 small basins that had been drained into a 20-acre central wetland. The new managers plugged seasonal wetlands with berms, and by July of a typical year, most are dry. The large wetland, where prairie cordgrass stood 10 feet tall when I visited, also sub-irrigates the surrounding prairie. After cordgrass seed is harvested in November they bale the hay, up to 10 tons per acre. At $100 per ton the cordgrass hay could gross $40,000 from 40 sub-irrigated acres with very little input cost. The professors and research students also laboriously hand collect sedge, whitetop and other wetland plant seeds for sale to Millborn Seeds in Brookings, seeds that can retail for hundreds of dollars per pound.

The other big value of wetland restoration, of course, is wildlife habitat. The first wetland restored in 2008 attracted over a thousand ducks the first season, with lots of nesting.”Typically small wetlands are drained or farmed through or around and have little wildlife value,” Johnson said.”But they can produce a perennial crop of seed, hay or biofuel as well as nesting and wildlife habitat. It’s a win-win for everybody, and it also helps recharge the aquifer.”

Those engaged in prairie preservation and restoration know that the dream of complete natural rehabilitation is out of reach. Some species are gone forever, and some, lacking the deep-rooted hardiness of big bluestem or purple coneflower, hover on the brink of extinction and are difficult to reestablish. But necessity and desire are strong. Along with patience and humility, Mother Nature teaches persistence and hope.

Editor’s Note: Jerry Wilson, retired managing editor of South Dakota Magazine, lives near Vermillion. Prairie restoration is among the subjects in his book Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff, available online or from the S.D. State Historical Society Press. This story is revised from the March/April 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

If You Live Long Enough

By Robert Speirs

I have lived in the western shadows of Crow Peak for nearly three decades, and in all of that time, I have never had this much company.

Long lines of tourists pack the drive, sitting with cameras and binoculars watching the mountain shed an irritating layer of pines after a fortuitous lightning strike gave her the opportunity to lose some weight.

It has been burning for four days now. The endless rotation of helicopters that fly over my roof in 5-minute intervals drop lake water from north of the interstate onto the flames in an attempt to steer the worst of the damage away from homes and ranches. Shifting winds hopefully will cause it to burn back upon itself and toward the layers of bug-killed pine that have fed the fire and kept it blazing.

I have a bit more history with Crow Peak than most. Other than having her name associated with my business, I spent a summer 36 years ago as a high school student building the hiking trail to the top. I earned my first promotion that June, becoming a crew chief while trying to impress a few of the ladies on my team by working a little harder than my companions.

I still have a piece of that summer on my desk — a pine slab cut from a pitch stump that we carried down from the summit on our shoulders. The growth rings are enormous, speaking of a 50-year period where it must have rained in epic proportions. Eventually, that tree was also taken by fire.

History tells us that between burrowing beetles and fire, the pine forest has been regularly swept away to make room for oak and aspen, grasses and wildlife. Each time, those who are merely tourists mourn the darkening of a specific view.

If you are only here for a short time, it seems such an inconvenience and perhaps even a loss to have a view you cherish altered during your days or years here.

But if you live long enough, or have faith that you might, fire can be a beautiful thing.

My grandfather is nearing 102. At his 100th birthday, he blessed me with a journal from my great-grandfather, who also lived more than a century. They both traveled through Spearfish 53 years ago to inspect me, their newly-born namesake. Great-grandpa’s journal mentions the lush hay fields along Spearfish Creek. He must have seen the barns now being dismantled and repurposed.

Barns, forests, and people transition through life and the newer versions can be even more beautiful than those they replace.

Many of us recall the devastation we felt in 1988 when more than a million acres of Yellowstone burned. Twenty-five thousand firefighters took turns battling the blaze. I, too, have fought fires for the Forest Service and admire the efforts being made on my behalf on the slopes of Crow Peak. Yet 20 years later, I relish my return trips to Yellowstone. The fire is but a memory and a few blackened stumps.

Here in the Hills, the two largest fires consumed 63,000 and 83,000 acres and occurred in the last 20 years. Once blackened, these areas are now some of the most sought after wildlife winter ranges, so much so that the majority of our elk now winter near Custer and bighorn sheep were able to be transplanted on the newly opened slopes near Deadwood.

If we live long enough, or expect to, fire can be seen as a way to sweep away the old and usher in the new. Perhaps there will be bighorns in Crow Peak’s future after the flames subside.

The thought of hiking the trail I helped build with future great-grandchildren and bumping bighorns from the rock slides is worth living a century for.

Robert Speirs is an educator and operates Crow Creek Wildlife Management Service in Spearfish.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Changing Pace

Photography by Stephen Gassman

Story by Katie Hunhoff

Kayakers float past the rocky shores of Sylvan Lake. Granite surrounding the lake is over 1.7 billion years old.

Dramatic granite spires border several Black Hills lakes, adding an atmosphere of permanence and serenity. Kelly Lane of Rapid City has been floating beneath the granite for over 50 years. But the veteran kayaker knows better than most of us that nothing lasts forever.

Kelly Lane credits kayaking for keeping him out of a wheelchair.

Lane was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 21 years ago. Today, at age 64, he credits his passion for kayaking as the reason he isn’t in a wheelchair full-time.”You have to reassess your life when you have Parkinson’s to find value in it, because it takes away what appears to be valuable for you. I refuse to allow it to do that. I have to find value in my life.”

Lane taught science for 20 years before Parkinson’s forced him to retire. Kayaking our mountain waters has been his salvation. He began the sport when he was just 12 years old. He wrote a guidebook in 2013 and is bursting with knowledge on all Black Hills waterways.

Even though most of the lakes are manmade, he says a Black Hills kayaker sometimes feels as if he’s a frontier explorer because of the solitude, framed by rock and pines. As the seasons change, he says,”There is always something new to marvel at, a different angle of light, a new beaver dam, a newly downed tree.”

Thirty-three lakes are hidden in the deep valleys of the Black Hills. Five are natural; most of the rest were formed by dams built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Lane says every drop of water in the Black Hills eventually drains into the Cheyenne River as it flows northeasterly to the Missouri.

Matt Howards, of Madison, Wis., lands a rainbow trout on Coxes Lake just outside of the Black Hills.

Lane loves kayaking the lakes because of the solitude.”There are so many lakes around the hills and so few people that, when paddling on them, you almost never have to share the lake with another boat,” he says. He often kayaks with his wife, Becky, a math teacher and avid outdoorswoman, and their twin daughters.

Sylvan Lake is a frequent destination.”It’s just beautiful. There’s no shore, it’s just lined with rock. But then you can go down the road to Legion Lake and there is mud and soft grass surrounding the lake. Completely different. And Coxes Lake sits just outside the Black Hills but you feel like you’re in the middle of the prairie.”

Lane’s favorite is Pactola, the largest reservoir in the Hills.”It’s our home lake. We paddle it in all seasons, even sliding on the ice in the winter. We paddle it all hours of the day and night, between dawn paddles, night paddles, and daytime uses. We teach on it, practice on it, race on it and relax on it,” he says.

Pactola is also a favorite of kayak instructor Chad Andrew, a friend of Lane.”Most of the wildlife I have seen has been at Pactola,” Andrew says. He’s spotted osprey (there is a nesting pair at Pactola), blue heron, mink, muskrat, coyote, deer, bald and golden eagles and other bird species.

Sylvan Lake is the oldest reservoir in the Hills.

Andrew guides students up Rapid Creek, which flows into Pactola near Silver City, for beginning whitewater instruction.”The further up you paddle the more intense the current will get until you can’t paddle upstream any further,” he says. To get near the creek, Andrew recommends accessing the Jenny Gulch area and then following the cove to the right toward the cliff jumping area. You will have to paddle a half-mile before you see the lake thin into Rapid Creek.

Pactola and Sheridan are great lakes for beginners, but Andrew recommends all kayakers take a safety course before getting on the water. He takes safety seriously. His brother was killed while kayaking at the Potomac Falls near Washington, D.C. Andrew is certified with the American Canoe Association as a Level 4 whitewater kayaking instructor. Both Lane and Andrew are members of a group advocating for a paddle park by M Hill in Rapid City, near the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. They believe a man-made kayaking area will offer a safe, controlled environment for tubers and kayakers.

Quickly changing weather is the biggest danger for kayakers on the usually calm Hills lakes. One year, Andrew was caught in a hailstorm while on Pactola.”By the time I reached my car, vehicles were damaged and windows were broken out,” he says. Luckily, he always wears a helmet to be a good example to his students.”With golf ball sized hail, it was a definite bonus to have my helmet,” he says.

Every spring, as ice recedes from the lakes, Lane returns to the water. Parkinson’s has robbed him of other outdoor interests like running and skiing, but friends help him continue to kayak.”Someone will say ‘I’m heading to this spot’ and I’ll just ask them to pick me up.” The disease has changed him, Lane says, but not in the ways you might think.”Parkinson’s doesn’t slow me down, it changes my pace. It doesn’t take things away, it makes me choose other things.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A Nature Hike Without Solitude

By Bernie Hunhoff

Korczak Ziolkowski envisioned the Crazy Horse carving as not just mountainous art, but as a living symbol. That’s never more evident than on volksmarch weekends.

Can a man have a wilderness experience with 5,000 people on the same mountain? We sought an answer to that question by joining the multitudes of hikers at the annual Crazy Horse Volksmarch.

Traffic snarls are nearly as rare as white buffalo in the southern Black Hills, so you know you’re on the right road to the Volksmarch when Highway 16 west of Custer becomes bumper-to-bumper vehicles. Follow the crowd to a flat valley in the pine-covered foothills, where volunteers on horseback provide some semblance of order since there are no yellow lines in the grass to organize the parking.

The ascent to the peak begins on logging trails in the pine forest. As you climb, the trees give way to expansive views of the forest, mountains and prairie.

A few registration preliminaries are required (entrance to Crazy Horse is free if you bring a cash donation or canned food for Feeding the Hungry, but the Black Hills Volksport Association charges a flat $3 per hiker). Within minutes you’ll be walking into the forest.

We were a three-generation group, the youngest a 5-year-old with a walking stick who kept running far ahead of us and then darting back. He was taking four steps to our one.

The beginning trails are dirt or gravel work roads and deceptively easy. The morning mountain air is cool and crisp, so you congratulate yourself for wearing a jacket and bringing warm clothes for the kid.

In the clearings, you’ll soon have a glimpse of the mountain sculpture that was begun in 1947 by Korczak Ziolkowski. Crazy Horse’s 87-foot-tall face is now complete, and on his 263-foot outstretched arm you can see that some of the hikers got a much earlier start than you. Hikers can begin as early as 6 a.m. They must have been very cold, you think. Didn’t they know better?

Though climbers share the mountain with thousands of fellow hikers, the only congestion is at the top and the bottom.

The first stretch of the 6.2-mile roundtrip is a pleasant stroll like you might take in some hills by the Missouri River. Jump over a fallen log, duck under a low branch. Uphill and downhill you go, happy for that jacket and your good sense to start in mid-morning. Local church and youth groups offer snacks and beverages at rest stops, and candy for the kid. Medical professionals are also near at hand.

After a mile or two, the pine trees become fewer so you lose their shade just as South Dakota summer sun shows its strength. That’s also about the time that the climb becomes more vertical, although the elevation only rises about 500 feet on the entire march.

Up we went. The jacket comes off. The 5-year-old, who has probably already traveled 10 miles in his circuitous style, wants a ride on someone’s back. And why did you bring the binoculars and the camera bag?

But people twice your age are climbing and talking, and passing you and the 5-year-old so you can’t slow down. Well, maybe a short rest so the kid can share his licorice from the last rest stop.

Walking sticks and canes are helpful aids to older hikers and handy toys for their youthful companions.

Your fellow travelers are mostly South Dakotans, but some have East Coast accents and a few speak a foreign tongue. The atmosphere is festive. There’s much picture-taking, of course. Some hikers find friends from home, and others stumble on long-lost acquaintances. The Ziolkowskis, who are still in charge, say a few marriage proposals have even been made in the heady air of the world’s largest mountain carving.

The last ascent is a steep grade but you can see the stone face now, and a thousand people ahead of you and behind you. One step after another. Stop to enjoy the expansive Black Hills landscape. A few more steps. A few hundred more. And you’re there, atop Crazy Horse, 6,000 feet above sea level.

The fastest and fittest hikers make the trek in less than an hour, but most people take two hours to climb and an hour or so to descend.

While walking down the mountain you realize that a wilderness experience doesn’t require solitude. Five thousand people only add variety to the Volksmarch, especially once the 5-year-old regains his stamina on the down-hill side.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117. The 31st Crazy Horse Volksmarch is June 4-5. An autumn volksmarch on the mountain is set for Oct. 2. It’s considered the most popular organized hike in America.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Old Growth Pines

By Mark Meierhenry

Photography by Stephen Gassman

Our oldest trees are seldom the prettiest specimens in the Black Hills forest. They survive on high granite crags, far from civilization.

Eight centuries of South Dakota news and weather are recorded and preserved in gnarled old Ponderosa pines that grow high in the Black Hills forest. Stories of fires, earth slides, wet periods and severe droughts are stored beneath their bark.

Ponderosa pine is a relatively new species on the Great Plains, only dating back about 11,000 years. But the prolific pines now cover about 1 million of the Black Hills forest’s 1.25 million acres.”No one is sure exactly when the tree took root in the Black Hills,” says Frank Carroll of the Black Hills National Forest Service. Researchers at the University of Wyoming hope to answer that question.

The oldest pines live in granite crags high in the mountains of the central Black Hills, in places not easily reached by people or fire.”Rocky ridges are typically difficult areas for other trees to grow, and offer great defenses from fire and insect predators,” Carroll says.

The forestry term”old growth” generally refers to pines 150 years of age or older. Many such patches exist in the Black Hills, despite more than a century of logging and development. One particular place near Mount Rushmore has trees known to be over 600 years old; another summit by Hill City has trees over 750 years old.

The aged pines are gnarled, knotted and crooked, and often show damage from lightning and wind. They usually survive on barren, rocky environs that hardly seem fit for plant life. Their bark is thick and plated like armor, with big crevices.

The forest floor is a cornucopia of cones, needles, wildflowers and grasses. When the vegetation become stoo dry, it can ignite into fire, the scourge of old growth trees.

Forest Service officials don’t advertise such trees’ exact locations because some people do not respect antiquity. The oldest living thing on earth was killed in 1964 when a student cut down Prometheus, a 4,862-year-old Bristlecone pine in Nevada, for study. Now the oldest is a 4,769-year-old Bristlecone pine known as Methuselah, rooted in the White-Inyo Mountains of California. Methuselah was recording climate conditions on its rings before the written word was developed in Mesopotamia (now Iraq).

Trees tell their stories through their rings, layers of wood cells formed during each growing season. Thin-walled cells formed early in the growing season are called earlywood. Later in the growing season, thicker-walled cells called latewood are produced. The ring is determined from the inside edge of the earlywood to the outside edge of the latewood. The most fruitful growing conditions produce larger cells, and the circumference of the tree expands accordingly.

Tree rings can also be used to date wooden artifacts even after a tree has been cut down. They can determine the age of a long abandoned cabin in the Black Hills, or of a wooden bridge, or old mineshaft. A thousand years from now, scientists will be able to determine when the Missouri River’s concrete dams were built by studying the rings of trees drowned by the rising water.

Scientists can determine when ancient events occurred by tracing the effects of landslides, fires, glaciers and other catastrophes. The mapping of younger trees surrounded by older trees might reveal, for example, that the new growth of young trees filled the rubble of an earth slide.

Ring data is obtained by taking core samples from the pines, causing no harm to the tree. Scientists insert a small hollow rod into the trunk to capture a cross section of the rings. The tube is then withdrawn and the data is preserved and interpreted.

The rings inside ancient trees tell the stories of catastrophic natural events from centuries ago.

Scientists can compare the rings of individual trees to others in a certain geographic area — for example, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota — to learn the history of weather patterns that occurred on the Northern Plains before written time.

A particular 762-year-old pine tree near Hill City was the source of a scientific paper by Matthew Bunkers on the history of droughts in the area. Bunkers, a science and operations officer at the National Weather Service’s Rapid City bureau, has written many papers on our local weather.”The most interesting fact from our research is that droughts likely have exceeded the duration and intensity of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought,” Bunkers says.

South Dakota students were once taught that the Great American Desert began at the 100th Meridian, which runs through the small town of Blunt, east of Pierre. Eastern bankers once hesitated to loan money to homesteaders and businesses west of that longitudinal line. Locals scoffed at the notion that the West was a desert, but the bankers had a point. The 1860s brought one of the worst droughts in the history of the Great Plains, and the period of 1859 to 1873 was drier than the infamous Dirty Thirties.

Our driest spell may have been a 20-year drought from 1531 to 1551, when the yet-to-be-mapped Dakotas were twice as dry as they were in the Dirty Thirties. The older dates are less scientifically reliable because of the lack of sufficient older trees to sample.

The driest recent periods, as determined from tree rings, were the 1933 to 1942 drought and a stretch from 1956 to 1961. The converse is also interesting. The period from 1962 to 1969, the wettest in recent memory, is the 10th wettest era. The period from 1882 to 1889, when much of South Dakota’s territorial history occurred, is the sixth wettest. Railroad and town boosters were then advertising Dakota’s lush prairie to people around the world. They didn’t mention the 1860s, especially not to the bankers.

Today many policy-makers, pundits, politicians and scientists are debating causes of climate change and whether our current shift is natural or man-made. We have a responsibility to sort through their arguments, and the oldest trees found in the United States — the Bristlecone pine, and their younger cousin, the Ponderosa pine — have much of the data we need to make informed decisions. We can argue about the weather, but the pine trees know.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.