Joel Schwader shared recent photos from Wind Cave National Park, home to a free-roaming bison herd, pronghorn antelope, deer, 30 miles of hiking trails, camping and the famous cave that spouts air. To see more of this Rapid City photographer’s work and to purchase prints, visit www.joeldphotography.net.
This traditional stave church nestled on the western edge of Rapid City is an exact reproduction of the 12th century Borgund stavkirke (stave church) of Laerdal, Norway. It was built in 1969 to house a Lutheran radio show, Lutheran Vespers. When the show moved to Minneapolis in 1975, a non-profit took over operation of the chapel. Local pastors preside over its nightly Vespers and vacationers are invited to visit the chapel and walk the grounds. Photos by Ryan Clayton. See more of his work at https://www.facebook.com/imagesbyryan
Cleopatra Creek is among the dozens of rivulets that run through the valleys and gullies of the northern Black Hills and empty into Spearfish Creek as it races northward to Redwater Creek. The Cleopatra looks no different from any other creek. However, locals know it as the home to Devil’s Bathtub. Well off the beaten path, Devil’s Bathtub has attracted visitors for decades. Photos by Ryan Clayton, Rapid City. See more of his work at https://www.facebook.com/imagesbyryan
Pierre photographer John Mitchell shared these images from his Labor Day weekend visit to the Black Hills. See more of his work at http://www.sodakmoments.com/
Jeanne Apelseth shared these photos of Bear Butte State Park and Bear Butte Lake, just a few miles north and east of Sturgis. The area is sacred to many Native American tribes. According to Cheyenne custom, Bear Butte is where holy man Sweet Medicine met the Creator and the Four Sacred Persons who guard the universe. Traditional religious ceremonies are still held there.
Bonny Fleming shared these photos of spring at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. See or purchase more of her work at bonzeye.asiostudio.com.
Pat Baird had houseguests during the 2011 Black Hills Stock Show when she became sick with the flu.”My husband got the company out of the house for the day and I went to bed. Around midafternoon I came downstairs and looked at my computer,” Baird remembers.”There was an email that said, ‘Watch the Oprah Show today. There’s a young couple from South Dakota who will be on. The husband was severely injured in the war.'” Baird checked the clock. The show started in 1 minute so she pushed record and went back to bed. A few days later they watched the episode featuring Yankton’s Corey Briest, a soldier gravely wounded while serving in Iraq.”Heart strings were tugged and we said, ‘Wow. We’ve got to do something,'” Baird says.
The couple, both retired military, soon founded Operation Black Hills Cabin. The non-profit organization provides a free, or nearly free, weeklong vacation to qualifying combat-wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families. OBHC hosted its first family June 2011 in a borrowed cabin, but coordinating donated time-shares was difficult. An OBHC board member suggested purchasing a Governor’s House after the city of Custer donated land on the edge of town.
“It took us six months to order the house because we were so scared of this huge bill,” Baird says. But the group fundraised enough to dissuade fears and ordered a three-bedroom house built by prisoners at Springfield’s Mike Durfee State Prison.”They don’t even build the three-bedroom house anymore, but they did that just for us,” says Ione Fejfar, a board member also from Custer.”Then they contacted all of their normal suppliers and said, ‘This is what we’re doing. Can you help us?'”
Many businesses were inspired by their mission and donated upgrades like a fireplace, sprinkler system, vaulted ceilings and air conditioning. Patriot Guard Riders escorted the 1,200-square-foot, handicapped accessible home to Custer in March 2013.
Board members expected to write a large check upon arrival but found they owed nothing.”The house was granted to us by the governor through the South Dakota Housing Authority,” says Carol Johnson, a board member who helps remotely from Watertown.”Then the furniture was donated and then the window treatments were donated. It’s incredible how anybody who hears about the cabin is inspired by it. It really is South Dakota’s thank you gift to our wounded veterans.”
Contributions have come from across the state for upkeep, insurance, taxes and snacks for each family. Local quilters provide a Quilt of Valor and Black Hills attractions donate free admission and meals. But guests don’t have to sight-see. They can just relax, Baird says.”We had a quadriplegic from New Orleans come up. He said that as he was sitting on the deck and listening to the pine trees that this was the first time he had peace since he came back from the war.”
The most recent donation is the Healing Hike planned by volunteers from Ellsworth Air Force Base and the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Veterans Club. They’ll build a path behind the cabin this spring with inspirational messages, a wheelchair accessible picnic table and benches.
And remember that email Baird received telling her to watch the Oprah Winfrey Show? Baird couldn’t remember who sent it, so she went back to check and couldn’t find it.”There was no email,” Baird says.”Everything with this project has fallen into place like that.”
Update 07/31/15: Operation Black Hills Cabin welcomed its first South Dakota family in June. Jason Meyer, an Iraq War veteran, visited the cabin with his wife Amanda and their two daughers. The organization hopes to serve more South Dakota families in the near future.
Operation Black Hills Cabin is open May 1 through September 30. For more information or to download an application for consideration, visit www.operationblackhillscabin.org.
Update 07/31/15: Operation Black Hills Cabin welcomed its first South Dakota family in June. Jason Meyer, an Iraq War veteran, visited the cabin with his wife Amanda and their two daughers. The organization hopes to serve more South Dakota families in the near future.
It was 9 degrees below zero and snowing sideways when Joel Schwader photographed these buffalo at Wind Cave National Park near Hot Springs. “Most people thought I was crazy,” Schwader says. “I pushed snow with the front bumper of my van to get to a place that has no cell phone service. For hours I sat on the edge of a gravel road near Boland Ridge and tried my best to capture the raw courage and simple beauty of the North American bison.” Visit joeldphotography.net to view more of the Rapid City photographer’s photos or order prints.
Some Black Hills tourist promoters began to market Trojan as a ghost town in 1959, ignoring the fact that Alvin Carlson still lived there. Trojan was once a prosperous Black Hills mining town that lost population due to mine consolidations. Most residents moved to Deadwood or Lead to work for Homestake.
When Trojan was declared a ghost town, travelers began to stop and take photos. Some even walked into Carlson’s house without knocking. “I went down to the Chamber of Commerce and told those people if they didn’t stop tellin’ folks this was ghost town that this old ghost was gonna start shootin’ at a few people,” Carlson told a South Dakota Magazine writer in 1999. “They’d come in here with out of state license plates, walk in, snoop through my stuff and just take it. I come unglued when people take my stuff and that’s when I decided to move it back down the road a ways.”
Yes, in the 1970s, Carlson did just that: he moved the town’s buildings to a spot less than a mile away. He and his brother-in-law used a heavy-duty truck and a cable and dolly system to jack up each structure.
Trojan held almost all of Carlson’s memories. He went to school there, made friends there, married and worked there. Even without the people who made the memories, Trojan was still his home. But in 1998, Wharf Mining Company purchased the land under Trojan’s new town site. At age 74, he wasn’t up to the task of relocating the town a second time.
Several other South Dakota towns are one-man or one-house towns. Pat and Wayne Surat are the only residents left in the southeastern South Dakota town of Bijou Hills. It, like Trojan, was once a booming town home to a bank, newspaper, blacksmith shop, Ford dealership, soda fountain, churches and a grocery store. Unlike the slow decline suffered by most towns, Bijou Hills disappeared a building at a time because an eccentric farmer from nearby Academy bought them and moved them onto his farm. So although the Surats still live in town, the rest of the town has moved except for their house, Wayne’s mother’s house and a church.
Philip O’Connor, the last man living in the small town of Capa, was interviewed in 2009 for a BBC documentary about the Dirty Thirties. A crew arrived to film the town’s remaining buildings: a hotel, a barn, some houses, a school and church. The town was brought to life in 1906 when the railroad reached town. The Capa Hotel piped in mineral water from a nearby artesian well and became well known for its mineral bath treatments. The Great Depression greatly contributed to the town’s demise. Phil lives in the house his grandparents and parents occupied. He taught school for two decades in the surrounding counties.
What motivates a man or a woman to stay in a town long after the other people, and maybe even the buildings, of the past are gone? Perhaps Carlson said it best when he contemplated moving from Trojan: “I could go to Florida or Alabama where I have family, but it’s too hot down there,” he said. “I’m only satisfied here. As soon as I get to Boulder Canyon I start to feel better. The closer I come to Trojan the better I feel. I’ll find a place in the hills not too far away.”
In December of 1996, Dallas and Mary Dietrich had their future planned. The Keystone couple owned four businesses in the Black Hills. Their daughter Dawn and son-in-law Joe Krutzky would soon move from Orlando to manage the couple’s two souvenir shops. Their son Deric, a junior at the University of South Dakota, planned to run their Rapid City and Spearfish ski equipment shops after graduation. But a horrific accident changed all of that.
On Jan. 4, 1997, the entire family was taking Dawn and Joe to the Omaha airport, but blizzard conditions on Interstate 90 made visibility difficult. Dallas drove 35 miles per hour as they neared Alexandria and Mary unbuckled her seatbelt to watch the shoulder. Suddenly, a semi rear-ended them at 75 miles per hour.
“He scooted us one-and-a-half football fields after he hit us,” Dallas says.”So all three of the kids were killed in the back seat and I was crushed between the steering wheel and seat.” Mary suffered non-life threatening broken and cracked ribs, but Dallas had no radial pulse.”They pretty much saved my life in Mitchell with the operation they did on my chest,” Dallas says. He was flown to Rapid City Regional Hospital the next day and rehabbed back and spinal cord injuries for six weeks. Dallas had some use of his legs for a while but now uses a wheelchair.
“With our plans kind of down the toilet, we were sitting around wondering what to do,” Dallas says. He had often dreamed of creating a children’s summer camp”up in the hills.” Mary saw the old Otho tin mine, 4 miles southeast of Keystone, for sale in a real estate magazine.”She said, ‘Why don’t you just buy yourself a town?’ She was joking but I didn’t know that,” Dallas says.”I couldn’t sleep; I just thought about it and thought about it. We came out here and thought, ‘What better way to memorialize the kids than to purchase this place and have people enjoy it for generations to come.'”
The couple bought the mine, established in 1892, dilapidated buildings and all.”Oh man, they were in bad shape,” Dallas recalls.”There were four of them: the bunkhouse, cookhouse, supervisors’ cabin and office. We put foundations under them and my father-in-law and my dad both said, ‘What are you doing? Just level them and start over again.’ But I just felt that this was history.”
As Dallas and Mary worked on their little town, their vision and mission changed. Dallas had long advocated for the disabled. Since 1979 he’s helped organize Black Hills Ski for Light, an event that allows people with disabilities to enjoy cross-country and downhill skiing. The couple recognized the need for accessible vacation options and felt obligated to make their resort available to anyone.”But to get the buildings on the National Historic Register and, at the same time, make them fully accessible was quite a trick,” Dallas says.”It took a lot more time and effort and a lot more money that I ever anticipated, but we got the job done.”
The first group stayed at the resort, now called Meeting the Need, in September 2003 and the Otho tin mine was added to the National Historic Register in 2004. Grants, donations, and volunteers made it possible, and they still operate with no paid employees.
The resort has 23 beds in the original buildings and two new walled tents, but they can accommodate more. There are places for tents and small RVs. Wooden boardwalks connect everything.”Recently we finished the tree house that’s 12 feet in the air. It’s got a 200-foot ramp so little kids in wheelchairs can wheel up and spend a night there, so that’s pretty cool.”
The Dietrichs charge $25 per person per night and guests have access to the fire pit and a few horses.”We have a number of tourist facilities, like Reptile Gardens, the 1880 Train and Crazy Horse, that provide free participation to our guests. And we own an old time photo place so that groups that have disabled family members can get an old time photo,” Dallas says.”It’s pretty affordable for most folks and, of course, if there’s somebody with disabilities that can’t afford it then we would waive all charges.” He’d specifically like to offer free stays to South Dakota’s disabled veterans as a way of giving back.
Meeting the need is open May through September and they still have openings for this summer. Able-bodied guests are welcome, but they give preference to those with disabilities. Call (605) 666-4610 or email dallasdietrich@hotmail.com to make reservations.
