Tag: sica hollow

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Autumn in the High Country

By Christian Begeman

Autumn always comes early to the high country. While late summer lingers across the rest of the land, the high coulees and upper draws seem to consistently show the first real signs of the season. The last week of September is normally the peak of fall color in places like Spearfish Canyon, the Slim Buttes and even Sica Hollow in the northeast corner of the state. For this reason, I regularly find myself wandering the back roads and trails of the high country every year about this time. It’s not that I welcome the end of summer, but it’s hard not to love autumn around here.

The beauty is fleeting, admittedly. When the weather patterns switch in this season of change, it brings strong winds that rob the trees of their dying leaves. That’s a lesson unto itself. There is beauty in endings. Sad though it is, it helps that there is promise of new life returning after the long winter.

This year I started around Sica Hollow during the golden hour on September 26. I was a bit early for fall color peak, but the color that was showing in the late afternoon and evening light seemed to accent the autumn beginnings quite wonderfully. A couple of days later I hit Badlands National Park, where the upper draws of Sage Creek were brilliant. One thing I learned is that yellow-leaved trees make for interesting visuals in a black and white image. They look nearly white.

After spending a day and half wandering around the Badlands, I made my way for Custer State Park. Needles Highway offers unique autumn color combined with winding roads and sweeping vistas. The fall foliage along the park’s creeks also offers colorful hues. From Custer State Park, I headed to the high country of Lawrence County by way of the Mystic and Rochford roads, finally ending up in Spearfish Canyon by late afternoon. This scenic byway is a must-drive in autumn. One extra perk this year was a small herd of mountain goats grazing near Bridal Veil Falls.

I finished up my tour of the high country in the first days of October by traveling north to the Slim Buttes and Cave Hills of Harding County. These areas are part of the Custer National Forest primarily for their stands of evergreens atop the buttes and hills, but they both offer great stands of deciduous trees along the draws and valleys. These places have become an autumn favorite for me. This year I missed the peak at the Slim Buttes as the color was nearly gone when I passed through, but the Cave Hills were nearly perfect. It goes to show just how fleeting fall’s beauty can be here on the high plains, even within a single county. Even so, the drive and views were worth every minute. The good news is that now the rest of the lower country as well as city and towns should be starting their autumn transformations. So, if you couldn’t make it to the high country, you still have a chance to get out and enjoy the rest of the season.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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South Dakota’s Spooky Side

By John Andrews

It seems every town in South Dakota has a ramshackle old house that people believe to be haunted. In Lake Norden, it was just down the street from my house. It was small and had long been abandoned. It also had what looked like iron bars on one of the windows, which I’m sure fed the legends that older kids shared with us. I never ventured very close to it, and I always gave it a sidelong glance whenever I walked past on the street.

South Dakota boasts plenty of spooky places, where voices moan in the twilight and things go bump in the night. Several years ago, we spoke to Chris Hull about strange goings-on at Sica Hollow State Park near Sisseton. Hull is a Sisseton native who works for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks. Six generations of his family have lived around Sica Hollow, a beautiful woodland known for both spectacular fall foliage and haunting legends that date back to its very first Native American inhabitants, who christened the forest”sica” (bad, or evil). Visitors have reported hearing phantom drumbeats in the distance, and seeing bubbling bogs brimming with crimson-tinted water.

Hull and some friends planned to camp in the hollow one night. One member of the party returned home to retrieve a few forgotten supplies.”We were hiking and heard him yell from down in the hollow,” Hull recalled.”He must have yelled five or six times. We wondered if his truck had gotten stuck and he had started walking.”

Hull’s group walked to the bottom of the hollow, but their friend was nowhere to be found. They returned the campsite just as he returned.”He said he was at home, and he had all the sleeping bags and things he’d gone to get.”

Guests and employees at the Bullock Hotel in Deadwood have long reported spooky encounters. The hotel is said to have been haunted ever since its namesake, Seth Bullock, died in Room 211 in 1919. A Sioux Falls television crew visited the Bullock for a Halloween story and listened intently, albeit skeptically, to the staff’s stories. Then, while in the basement, the reporter heard a woman laughing good-naturedly in her ear. But when she turned around, there was no one there. Later, when they reviewed the videotape, the reporter’s voice was the only clearly audible sound — other than unexplained static at the precise moment the reporter heard the mysterious laughter.

We’ve also written about an eerie stretch of 424th Street between Carthage and Fedora that locals call Spooklight Road. For years, people living along that gravel road have reported seeing the bright headlights of a vehicle heading north at night. As they waited for the vehicle to pass their farmsteads, nothing ever showed up. One local legend says the light is the lantern from a wagon train of settlers that got caught in a blizzard and died.

If you’re feeling brave, take a friend and explore one of South Dakota’s spooky places this Halloween season. My only advice is to keep a safe distance.

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Autumn Mysteries

By Katie Hunhoff

Visitors have long reported strange occurrences at Sica Hollow in Roberts County. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

South Dakotans are no-nonsense folks, so we always struggle to find supernatural tales for our October issues, but we have heard a few through the years. One of my favorite spooky stories, published in our September/October 2014 issue, is about a mysterious bright, white light in Miner County that appears out of nowhere. Locals call it the spooklight. It can be seen along a particular stretch of dirt road between Carthage and Fedora. The story’s author, Donna Palmlund, talked to family and neighbors to get their spooklight accounts.

Palmlund’s father grew up on a farm west of Spooklight Road. His grandfather would say that sometimes the spooklight was so bright they could sit inside and read by it. After the Hass family moved off the farm, a man named Joe Spader lived there. “After I moved to that farm it wasn’t long before I was aware of this light that was very peculiar,” Spader said. He described the light as looking like a bright spotlight cresting a hill and then going down the hill, but a car would never materialize. Before he heard about the spooklight, he was worried someone was trying to steal something.

Another mysterious light has been seen in southeast South Dakota, looking over Nebraska’s Crazy Peak, which rises above the chalkstone bluffs on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. Sometimes the view gives South Dakotans an unexplainable light show. “I’ve seen all sorts of UFOs there in the past,” said Carvel Cooley, a longtime local historian. “It’s just lights. They don’t make any noise and they can stop, start, zap out of sight, disappear and reappear.” Although a lot of locals have seen the lights, most don’t talk about it. Some give credit for the lights to swamp gas. Others bring up the Santee Sioux legends of seeing “little people” in the neighborhood of Crazy Peak.

Another well-known eerie South Dakota spot is Sica Hollow in Roberts County. Reports of strange voices, lights flashing in creek bottoms and bubbling red bogs along the Trail of Spirits make Sica Hollow a spooky place to visit any time of year. Its first Indian inhabitants dubbed the forested area”sica,” meaning bad or evil.

We visited with Chris Hull several years ago. Six generations of Hull’s family have lived near Sica Hollow. He has spent countless hours hunting or camping in the forest and has seen the glowing lights. Once he also had a more mysterious experience while camping with friends. They realized they had forgotten supplies, so one friend drove home to get them.

“We were hiking and heard him yell from down in the hollow,” Hull told us. “He must have yelled five or six times. We wondered if his truck had gotten stuck and he had started walking. So we walked for a mile and got down to the bottom, but there was nothing there. We climbed a hill to search for lights and found nothing. Finally we went back to the campsite and he pulled in at the same time. He said he was at home and he had all the sleeping bags and things he’d gone to get. But all five of us heard him yelling that night.”

When the leaves fall and Halloween is close at hand, we all like a good South Dakota ghost story. If you have one to share, let us know in the comments below or email editor@southdakotamagazine.com.