Tag: west river

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Shortgrass Spring

By Christian Begeman

When was the last time you had lunch with a view? I was never much of a picnic person. Growing up, I was too easily annoyed by gnats, mosquitos, black flies and ants trying to get at my food before I did to really enjoy the picnic experience. And I like my food, mind you. But the first day of June may have changed my view on picnics. It wasn’t really because of the food (I had a ham and cheese sandwich, a bag of cheese flavored snack mix and a cold soda). It wasn’t because of the company since I was alone. It was the view, and everything that came with it.

The location was the northeastern edge of Sheep Mountain Table in Badlands National Park. I parked my vehicle at one of the sidetracks that lead to an overview and found a nice place to hang my legs over the edge and take in the scenery. The sky was that early summer, perfect azure blue graced with white clouds moving swiftly overhead. The breeze was light, stirring just enough to bring the sweet smells of blooming chokecherry blossoms up the slopes to linger over me and my picnic spot. Meadowlark song with an occasional mourning dove coo echoed between the cut banks and ravines that stretched as far as the eye could see. The chalky white badland formations against the late spring grass — a verdant green after abundant rainfall — seemed almost too perfect to be real. But there it was. As real as it gets. I wore a black t-shirt that soaked up the sun and concentrated the warmth on my back. It was one of the first solid warm days I’ve felt this year. It didn’t take long to realize that I had stumbled upon maybe the perfect lunch situation.

Ironically, during this picnic, I didn’t take my camera out of the car. And that was OK. There are some moments in life that are better left un-photographed. Even as I reminisce and try to describe that perfect picnic with a view, I can almost feel the warmth and smell the chokecherry blossoms again. Removing the pressure of”perfectly” capturing the moment with a camera turned out to be a gift that allowed me to capture this memory with more depth and breadth. These are the memories that will keep me coming back to such places for as long as I can.

That said, I was not without my camera gear on this latest week in West River. This collection of 18 photos shows the other reasons I take such trips. Driving, hiking and simply experiencing the landscape after it has thoroughly woken up from a long winter’s nap breathes life back into me just as it does the wide windswept landscapes of western South Dakota.

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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In Search of the Fairburn Agate

By John Andrews

Fairburn agates can be found in several locations in southwestern South Dakota, but the most popular spot might be the Kern agate beds east of Fairburn.

It was barely past 9 a.m. and sweat already soaked our shirts. The forecast called for highs in the 90s, but as the sun baked the hardened gumbo and reflected off rocks strewn throughout the Kern agate beds east of Fairburn we could feel the midday heat about six hours early.

We had met Don Bahr, a retired law enforcement officer and rock hound, in Rapid City at 7:30 that morning and headed south toward Fairburn in search of Fairburn agates, perhaps the most sought after gemstone in South Dakota.”I can’t guarantee anything,” Bahr had cautioned us several times in the preceding months as we planned our trip, knowing that people have spent days scraping and turning rocks only to leave with nothing. We told him that we understood; we didn’t really expect to find anything. We just wanted an inside look at this rare and valuable gem that beckons to rock hounds far and wide, who venture far off the beaten path hoping to find a Fairburn — or even a piece of a Fairburn — even though at the end of the day all they have are a backache and a sweat-soaked shirt.

***

Fairburn Agates hold a curious power over collectors who scour the Black Hills and Badlands for them. Various types of agates — colorful gemstones formed millions of years ago inside sedimentary rock — are found all around the world. The Lake Superior Agate, found along the shores of its namesake lake, is highly prized in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Even in western South Dakota, rock hounds discover water agates, lace agates, bubble gum agates, prairie agates and several other varieties that feature interesting shapes and patterns inside. But the Fairburn remains elusive and highly prized. It is only found in the Black Hills and surrounding badlands and grasslands of southwest South Dakota and northwest Nebraska. Its outer shell — often a chocolate or sandy brown coating called the matrix — is not necessarily impressive, but its bright, concentric inner rings of red, orange, yellow, pink, blue, green or even black and incredibly tight banding can be mesmerizing. They are unlike any other gem on earth; collectors pay hundreds of dollars (and sometimes more than $1,000) for particularly good specimens.

Fairburn agates, the official state gemstone of South Dakota, are recognizable by their bright colors and tight banding. Photo by Thomas P. Shearer.

Roger Clark was already a rock hound, but on a trip to the Badlands in the early 1970s he bought a book called Midwest Gem Trails by June Culp Zeitner, one of South Dakota’s pre-eminent amateur geologists and rock hounds. That’s how Clark, a lawyer practicing in Appleton, Wisconsin, discovered Fairburn agates. He knew immediately that he had to find one.

“It was kind of like a small, obsessive compulsive disorder,” he says with a chuckle.”And the longer it went on, the more the obsession grew.”

Three to five times a year, Clark made time for hunting trips to South Dakota.”I was so obsessed that I would leave work on Wednesday afternoon and drive to Sioux Falls. I’d get up in the morning and I could be out in the Badlands that afternoon. I could hunt for two days, and then I’d drive 14 hours back and go to work on Monday. It’s ridiculous to talk about it now, but you just get obsessed with these things.”

He searched for two years and never found a Fairburn. Then he met Art and Ann Bruce, veteran rock hunters from Hot Springs who were nearly 80 but still quite active. The Bruces agreed to take Clark and his wife, Mary Jane, to the agate beds and teach them. One day, on a trip to the Nebraska grasslands just south of Ardmore, Clark found his first Fairburn.”It was just happenstance,” he says.”I just happened to turn over the right rock.”

Today, Clark has around 1,000 Fairburn agates in his collection, and he’s bought and sold many more. But his first agate remains on a shelf in his home office.”It’s red, and then clear, and then pink. Those are the predominant colors. It’s not a spectacular agate, but it’s just one of those moments that you remember.”

***

Not much was known about Fairburn agates when Clark started hunting them. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1930s and 1940s that interest in Fairburn agates began to sweep across the rock collecting community.”The longer I went on, the more I realized that I had to figure out where these things came from,” he says.”They don’t just appear in the Badlands. It didn’t make sense to me that nobody had followed that geologic course to find out where they originated.”

June Culp Zeitner was among the first to write extensively about Fairburns. Zeitner was born in Michigan in 1916, but her family eventually settled in Aberdeen. She graduated from Northern State University and took a job teaching in Mission, on the Rosebud Reservation. That’s where she met Albert Zeitner, whose family ran a hardware store and oversaw a small museum and rock shop. The two became acquainted, and for their first date Zeitner drove them to a remote location in the Badlands. He stopped the car, got out and disappeared over a hill. Soon she heard him shouting,”Fairburn! Fairburn!” She thought some sort of accident had befallen him and he was being burned, but her beau had actually found an agate. The experience not only created a memorable first date, but it launched June on a completely new trajectory and introduced her to a hobby that occupied much of her life.

The Zeitners traveled throughout North America from the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring mines and learning about the rocks and minerals they found. June wrote several books, more than 1,000 magazine articles and served as an assistant editor of Lapidary Journal, a periodical devoted to mineralogy. Perhaps her most important book, the one Clark bought on his trip to the Badlands, was Midwest Gem Trails, a field guide for rock and fossil hunters originally published in 1964.

Zeitner also created the State Stone Program, which allows each state to select an official state gem, fossil, mineral or rock. The South Dakota legislature officially designated the Fairburn agate as its state gemstone in 1966. When Zeitner died in Rapid City in 2009 at the age of 93, she was known far and wide as the First Lady of Gems.

During the decades Zeitner was writing about Fairburn agates, several theories explained their origin. Some people thought they had formed through ancient volcanic activity in the Badlands. Others proposed they had been eroded and somehow swept east when the Rocky Mountains formed.

A wrinkle in those ideas came when agates that looked almost exactly like Fairburns were discovered in Teepee Canyon, about 14 miles west of Custer and nearly 60 miles from the agate beds east of Fairburn. They appeared to be emerging from a layer of limestone, and they had the same bright patterns and banding as the Badlands agates. Zeitner suggested that maybe they were related, and even that Fairburn agates could have originated in the Black Hills. But other longtime collectors, including the Bruces of Hot Springs, refused to acknowledge any possible connection between Teepee Canyon agates and Fairburn agates.

Clark immersed himself in this world of conflicting theories. He studied Zeitner and the writings of other scholars and rock hounds and compared them with his own experience in the field. By 1998, he’d accumulated enough knowledge to present his own Fairburn agate origin story in a book called South Dakota’s Fairburn Agate, which includes diagrams and beautiful agate photography by his wife, Mary Jane. It is still available in certain museums and rock shops in the Hills.

His idea coincides with those of several other Black Hills geologists, and has come to be widely accepted. Fairburn agates were created between 250 million and 300 million years ago within the Minnelusa Formation, a layer of limestone that ranges from 75 to 1,300 feet thick and encircles the Black Hills. During the Black Hills uplift, between 35 million and 70 million years ago, around 400 square miles of the Minnelusa Formation was eroded — along with the agates it contained — and swept east into the Badlands. The agates were buried and are now slowly being revealed.

Some agate hunters still drew a firm line between Teepee Canyon agates and Fairburn agates, so Clark’s book was skeptically received. But in August of 2000 the Jasper Fire burned more than 85,000 acres of the Black Hills, including Teepee Canyon.”That location had been hunted for years, but when that fire burned, it burned off 8 or 10 miles of forest north of that Teepee Canyon area,” Clark says.”It was a very hot fire and it burned right down to the dirt. Afterwards, you’d see agates everywhere peeking out at you. That’s when we were really able to nail down the origin as the Minnelusa Formation.”

Exactly how Fairburn agates form remains somewhat mysterious. During the age in which they were created, far western South Dakota lay at the bottom of a vast ocean. Some geologists say that water rich in silica slowly trickled through passageways in the rock, and over time silica accumulated inside tiny pockets, creating an agate. Other compounds in the water, such as iron oxide (red) and manganese oxide (black), created the various colors.

Based on research conducted since the first printing of his book, Clark now believes that agates formed through a replacement process. Those pockets were originally filled with calcite, which dissolved when silica came into contact with it. And there is still debate over what causes the tight banding.”There are things that we still don’t understand,” Clark says.”It’s still a mysterious process. I’m 77 now, and I don’t think I’ll know in my lifetime, but that’s okay.”

***

“It’s like walking on the moon out here,” Bahr said as his gray 4×4 Jeep slowly navigated the heavily rutted path leading to the Kern agate beds.

The beds lie about 14 miles east of Fairburn, a tiny town of fewer than 100 people in Custer County that was settled in 1879. Its name –“Fair,” for pleasant and”burn,” the Scottish term for a stream or brook — is a nod to the winding French Creek, which flows just south of town.

Armed with a three-tined garden rake and a spray bottle of water, Don Bahr searches for elusive Fairburn agates.

We followed French Creek Road, a well maintained gravel route that passes several large ranches. As we turned north just beyond an old 4-H campground, the terrain grew rough. Bahr’s Jeep shook and rattled as we crossed the bone-dry bed of French Creek (“You do see a muffler lying on the ground out here once in a while,” he joked) and began the slight ascent into a landscape that did indeed look otherworldly.

Rocky hills rolled as far as the eye could see, covering thousands of acres. Maps often show the Fairburn agate beds as an elliptical belt stretching from near Creston in Pennington County to Orella in Sioux County, Nebraska. The beds vary in width, but the widest expanse covers about 15 miles near Red Shirt.

As we drove into the hills, we passed vehicles bearing license plates from Wyoming, Minnesota and New York — proof that hunters from near and far are welcome to scour the beds as long as they have the means to get there. That was not always the case.

An old widow that most agate hunters today know only as Grandma Kern may have been among the first people to realize what treasures could be found on her ranch land. Zeitner recounted the story of Jack Zasadil of Hermosa, who went agate hunting for the first time on the Kern ranch sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, only to be chased off by Grandma Kern and her shotgun. But as word spread and more rock hunters began showing up at Grandma Kern’s house, she started following them around the agate beds with coins in her apron pockets, hoping to buy what they found. Her cooperation may have been hastened by her ever-worsening blindness, which meant she could no longer find for herself the agates she grew to love.

Today there is no sign that anyone ever lived in these hills. A visitor might wonder if it would even be possible.

Bahr reminded us to keep our eyes on the ground the moment we stepped out of the Jeep. Fairburn agates aren’t found just on the hillsides. They can be hidden in patches of grass or even lying along the road. It’s also important to watch for rattlesnakes that occasionally come out to sun themselves on the rocky ground.

Our tools for the day were simple: a three-tined garden fork and a spray bottle of water. As we climbed the hills, Bahr scraped his rake through the top layer of rocks.”My theory is that there are all sorts of agates, just beneath the surface, or just barely poking out,” he says.”It’s just a stroke of luck to find one, because they’re not always just lying on the surface.”

Bahr has been a recreational rock hunter for 14 years. His first trip to the Kern beds offered a lesson in perseverance.”When you’re out here, you find these agates that look like Fairburns, but they’re prairie or water agates,” he says.”That first day I thought I was loaded. My pockets were bulging. But I didn’t have a single Fairburn.”

It took some time to learn the telltale attributes of a Fairburn. Now, as we scraped, kicked and dug our way up and down the hills, turning as many rocks as we could, hoping to see the bright colors and banding, Bahr simply said,”If you have to ask if it’s a Fairburn, it’s not.”

Still, we were unsure. Bahr had told us what to look for in the matrix — that brownish-gray outer shell — but the rocks began to look alike.”You could spend a week out here and not find a thing,” he gently reminded us.

He was in the middle of explaining the differences between volcanic and sedimentary agates when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence.”There’s Fairburn right there!” he said, hardly able to disguise his disbelief.

Our Fairburn agate, as we discovered it.

Could it be, that after no more than 20 minutes of searching, we had found what eludes other hunters for days, weeks, months and longer? We crouched to get a closer look, and though we’d never seen a Fairburn agate in person we recognized it immediately. Lying among white quartz, rose quartz, petrified wood and a multitude of other rocks was a tiny stone with blue, brown, yellow and red layers. A few sprays of water accentuated the colors and made the banding appear even more pronounced. It was less than an inch long — most likely a fragment from a much larger agate — but there was no mistaking that it was a Fairburn.

“There could be more right around here,” Bahr said,”but there are stories of people finding a piece like this, and somebody else finds one a mile away, and they fit together.”

We’ll probably never know where the rest of our agate lies. We searched the hills for another 90 minutes but found nothing more.

Do we attribute our discovery to beginner’s luck? Perhaps, but maybe we owed Mother Nature a debt of gratitude, as well. The night before our visit, the area around Fairburn received about an inch of rain, which helped wash away the top layer of rocks, exposing new stones that are slowly but constantly rising to the surface.

When Roger Clark began hunting agates more than 40 years ago, old timers like Art Bruce told him there was no point in visiting the Kern beds.”He was very clear that the agates had all been picked up,” Clark recalls.”They were gone. There was no use looking out in the Badlands anymore. People had just kind of given up. Now we know that it’s just a matter of time. Agates are washing out all the time in the Badlands.”

***

Fairburn agate hunting continues to evolve. Hunters still frequent the Kern beds and other hot spots in the Black Hills and Badlands, but today agates can just as easily be found in the middle of Rapid City. Landscape rock and other fill material often comes from gravel pits along the Cheyenne River. The pits are typically on private land and collectors need permission before exploring them, but the large piles of fresh material have often yielded beautiful agates. We heard of Fairburns being found in the parking lots at Walmart, K-Mart and even the roof of the Custer County jail.

Trade shows are still popular gathering places for rock hounds, but there is also a busy Facebook page called Fairburn Agate Hunter, where more than 2,200 people share their finds and stories.

It’s a passion that not everyone shares, but for those who do, the sweat, dirt and pain are all worth it.”In order to find a Fairburn, you may have to slide onto a cactus as I did,” June Culp Zeitner once wrote.”You may wear holes in your jeans rubbing the dust off stones to look for signs of fortifications. You may stare holes through your glasses. You may let out a yelp at a discarded rattlesnake skin, and get lost in a ravine.

“There’s something about it all that makes a real rockhound consider this fun. He wouldn’t work as hard for anyone for even the best wages, but to do it for fun — that’s different.”

Our hot day in the agate beds was just as she described. The working conditions might not sound good on a job advertisement — heat, isolation, random success and rattlesnakes — but the search gets in your blood.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Clams of Buffalo Gap

By Michael Zimny

Remnant of an ancient sea are sprinkled throughout the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

The Great Plains were long ago inundated by a shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway. Scientists say that marine fossils are evidence of this sea, not that Sasquatch carries a sack of fossils around, scattering them hither and yon to confound the trackers on his tail. You be the judge.

Marine fossils can be found in certain geological formations throughout the Western Interior Seaway region, including the Pierre Shale, which is notoriously fossiliferous. Ancient sea monsters like plesiosaurs, prehistoric sharks and big fish like Ichthyodectes have been plucked from its obsidian mounds. There are also beautiful ammonites (ancient mollusks that resemble a nautilus) and plain old inoceramids (ancient clams).

A portion of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland in the southwest corner of the state has a reputation for ammonite and other fossil finds in scree fields surrounding Pierre Shale and limestone exposures. To get there, take Highway 18 west about a mile and a half past Edgemont, turn right on the 9A, then after about 7 miles, a left on Fall River Road, which will take you into forest land near the Wyoming border. You’ll need a map, as BGNG lands are fairly checkerboarded.

The landscape’s euphoric undulance is so liberating you can understand how people invested in imposing grids would oversell the people they imported to work them on arability. Time goes soft and loses its linear oomph here. You can almost imagine a cowgirl riding the seaway on a mosasaurus like its name was Tilikum.

I still have much to learn about the art of fossil hunting, probably missing ammonites beneath my feet. Inoceramids are everywhere.

Think of how different your day is from that of your ancestors, say a thousand years ago. Clam (and pre-clam) life hasn’t changed much in 70 million years or so. The predators may have changed, from pterodactyls to Italians, but what’s that matter to a clam? Clams have always hung out in the sand, waiting for high tide so they can screen floaties with their siphon. That’s about it.

Their presence is a reminder of the Western Interior Seaway (or Sasquatch and his bag of fossils) and the epochal changes witnessed by these lands. Will our present human episode leave traces as permanent as those left by these bivalves?

Michael Zimny is a content producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and is based in Rapid City. He blogs for SDPB and contributes columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Baseball at Four Corners

Story by John Andrews

Photography by Matt Gade

The Four Corners baseball field sits at the junction of three highways about 40 miles west of Pierre.

To say baseball is the only game in town at Four Corners would be misleading, mostly because there is no town. Four Corners is simply the junction of highways 14, 34 and 63 about 40 miles west of Pierre. But there is a baseball field, thanks to a handful of farmers and ranchers who nearly 70 years ago wanted a place to play the game at the end of a busy day tending cattle and fixing fence.

The modern day Four Corners baseball team, which plays in the Pony Hills League of South Dakota’s amateur baseball association, is actually the club’s second iteration. The first dates back to the 1950s, when the fathers and uncles of many current players launched a fundraising drive to create a baseball field. In true ranch country fashion, donations included hay, cattle, machinery and precious time. Roy Norman collected money, and in 1953 purchased 14 80-foot light poles from a company in Ohio for $1,400. The height was important; Four Corners’ rival town of Philip had just installed 70-foot lights. They also gave Four Corners the unique distinction as the only non-municipal lighted field in the country.

Four Corners pitcher Adam Kaus delivers the ball during a Sunday doubleheader. Batters have to contend with sunlight reflecting off grain bins across the road.

Four Corners hosted its first game in the summer of 1954. Crowds of 200 to 300 people came to watch their neighbors play. Despite its remote location, finding players was rarely a problem, thanks to baseball’s great popularity during the 1950s and 1960s. But when needs arose, the men sought creative solutions. One summer, Four Corners needed another pitcher, so Norman placed an ad in the Omaha World-Herald seeking a farm laborer. The final line on the job description said candidates”must be able to pitch for a competitive amateur baseball team.” He found his pitcher. The young man spent the summer sleeping in the concession stand.

Four Corners’ heyday lasted until 1986, when the team’s aging founders opted for softball in other places. The field, no longer used, fell into disrepair. Its chicken wire backstop slowly disintegrated. Grass and weeds overgrew the dirt infield, swallowing home plate and the pitching rubber. For years, cattle roamed where outfielders once glided after lazy fly balls.

About 15 years later, the baseball bug re-emerged.”My cousins and brothers and I talked about the possibilities of it,” says Mike Hand, whose father, Dave, played for Four Corners.”And we just ran from there.”

Volunteers showed up, just like they did 50 years earlier.”We found the dimensions and mowed it,” Hand says.”We sprayed the weeds and grass off the infield. It took us a while, but a baseball field took shape.”

Baseball returned to Four Corners in the summer of 2002, and the team has been going strong ever since, maybe because familial ties unite the players, literally and figuratively. Mike Hand, the manager, is one of six Hands on the team, which includes his brother, his son and three cousins. The roster is rounded out by players who have moved away but still travel home from places like Wessington Springs, Mitchell and Wagner — 215 miles away — just to wear the Four Corners uniform.

Their dedication is remarkable. Because there is no city crew to help with maintenance, the players do it all, a task made more challenging due to the field’s lack of running water. Hand knows the field isn’t perfect, but they do their best.”If you ask players what the problems are, the first thing they’ll mention is the outfield,” he says with a laugh.”It’s not smooth; it’s kind of like playing Plinko because it’s tufts of grass and gopher holes.”

Shade is rare at Four Corners, so the players built small shelters for fans who bring chairs.

The lights, once a point of pride, no longer work, so game times are regularly Sundays at 4 p.m. That leads to another Four Corners quirk. The field faces south, so when batters come to the plate on a sunny Sunday afternoon, trying to catch a glimpse of the pitcher’s grip before he hurls the ball in their direction, all they see is sunlight glaring off seven grain bins on Mike Hand’s farm, which lies on the other side of Highway 34.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is travel.”Because we’re rural and in the middle of nowhere, hardly anybody will travel to Four Corners,” Hand says.”There are a few teams that willingly come every year. But last year we played 26 games and had five home games. It is not uncommon for us to travel 3,000 miles in a summer for baseball games.”

The travel is a matter of perspective. Four Corners once drove to Armour — 195 miles — after work for a game that began at 9 p.m. It finished at midnight, and then the players embarked on the 3 1/2 hour drive home.”Baseball is the only vacation and release we get from our normal, everyday lives,” Hand says.”The love of baseball itself is the best part of it.”

The question now is how long the players can sustain such a schedule. This group is in its 17th season of playing together. Hand says they are most likely the oldest team in the state; two players are over 50, six are over 40, five more are over 36 — and finding good baseball playing farmhands through newspaper advertisements isn’t as easy as it used to be.

There is hope in Fort Pierre, 35 miles away, where a long dormant junior legion program is once again fielding a team of 16- and 17-year-old players. Hand hopes to draw a few of them to their crossroads ball field in western Stanley County. If he’s successful, then even though there’s no gas or groceries at Four Corners, there will still be baseball.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

4 Corners warms up before the start of the first game of a doubleheader against the Plankinton Bankers during Pony Hills League action on Saturday, July 1. 4 Corners field sits 22 miles from the nearest town and six miles west of un-incorporated Hayes just Northwest of the Highway 63 and Highway 14 intersection.
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Accidental Rancher

The view from the north pasture on Eliza Blue’s ranch west of Bison. Photo by Christian Begeman.

South Dakota was supposed to be just another stop on Eliza Blue’s journey through life. The singer/songwriter had lived in Minneapolis, New York City and Portland, Maine. Then, about 10 years ago, she found herself in Perkins County, a self-professed urbanite gaining a small taste of rural life. Where she might have gone next, we’ll never know. She met and married a local rancher, and proceeded to fall in love with the land, the sky and all the joys and sorrows of West River life.

These days, she’s busy raising two children and tending to a menagerie of chickens, goats, sheep, cows and cats on the ranch west of Bison. Still, she manages to find time to contemplate and write about life on the Plains — the devastation of drought, the sense of community, the closeness of death and the wonderment of nature.

South Dakota Magazine collected several of these stories in a book called Accidental Rancher, released one year ago. The glimpses into Blue’s world are poignant and written with the uniquely lyrical perspective of a folk singer turned modern-day homesteader. Readers find themselves with Blue in her laundry room feeding bum lambs, following the antics of a rooster named Fancy Pants or, as in this excerpt called”Pigeons,” teaching her young son, affectionately called the Bean, about the miracle of life.

Pigeons

In the midst of several of our old outbuildings stands a grain bin. Years ago, a spring storm ripped two of the roof panels loose, the rain soaking and spoiling the small amount of grain pellets left inside. Since we run a predominantly grass-fed operation, it wasn’t a great loss, and fixing the roof didn’t rank high on our perennially insurmountable to-do list. So the grain bin, and the few inches of grain inside, have been left untouched by human hands.

Blue with her husband, Max Loughlin, and children Wesley and Emmy Rose, aka “The Bean” and “Roo.”

Who wants an abundant supply of grain, housed in a predator-free location, accessible only from the air? Pigeons, we discovered one day this summer, when my curious son asked to see what was inside the bin. The sound of the creaking door frightened them, and the small flock that now calls the grain bin theirs came exploding through the holes in the roof in a flurry of squawks and beating wings, frightening us as well.

That did not dissuade us from peeking inside, however, where we found, in addition to feathers and poop, several tiny nests, each holding a rosette of gleaming white eggs.

The Bean is an avid bird watcher and also a big fan of hunting for chicken eggs, so for the rest of the summer, we couldn’t pass the grain bin without a request to check on the nests. From time to time I’d humor him, and we’d crack open the metal door for a quick peek. Thus, we got to watch several of the eggs hatch and then transform from nestlings into fledglings.

One day, however, when we peered in, I could tell something was awry. A mother pigeon, thinking herself quite clever, had laid her eggs inside the large plastic bucket used as a scoop when the bin was still in service. The high walls of the scoop had hidden the babies from our view, and now, half-grown and ready to meet the world, they were too big to spread their wings in the cramped circle of the scoop, and were permanently trapped.

I crept in as quietly as I could, and turned the bucket over gently. The birds tumbled out. Two righted themselves and wobbled limply away from me, their panic evident, but the third, its muscles too atrophied to carry its own weight, couldn’t walk at all, and lay fluttering weakly with fear.

“Babies,” said the Bean.”Big babies.”

“Yes,” I replied,”but we better leave them be. They are so scared.”

The next day, the Bean asked to see them again, and I had to admit, I wanted to see them, too. I feared the worst, however. Indeed, one of the babies was dead, never having moved from where we’d last seen it. The other two were huddled against the tin wall of the bin, pressed hard against each other. Their terror was plain, and the Bean made no protest as I closed the door, saying,”They are still too scared.”

This continued for a few days. Each day I grew more certain we would find the two remaining babies dead, but each day, they looked about the same; hunched and miserable, not moving much. I considered trying to borrow a birdcage and taking them out of the bin, but I worried it would be too much for the poor creatures. It seemed it wasn’t just their muscles, but their spirits that were stunted. They were living in pigeon heaven, but they were slowly dying because they didn’t know how to do anything else.

I also wasn’t sure if they had any source of hydration. Presumably their mother was in charge of that, but these two were nearly full-grown, and I wondered if the period of depending on the flock for sustenance had expired.

Just in case, the next time we visited, I brought them a little fresh water in a plastic dish. As I laid it inside, they scuttled away from me, the first movement we’d seen since I’d freed them. I closed the door, and thought,”Well, it’s progress.” And I finally had an idea of how to help them.

Wesley reads to his sister and an injured lam that is recovering indoors.

When we returned the following morning, I brought water and a large stick. The day after, more water and another stick. I didn’t really have a plan, but I figured seeing new things might wake up their brains a little. The Bean would wait at the door, guarding against barn cats and dogs, while I followed the babies around for a few minutes, forcing them to explore the new objects we’d brought. They grew stronger and more agile with every visit, until, four days in, one of the birds hopped, wings fluttering, onto the crook of a branch. She perched there for a moment, teetering slightly. I looked back at the Bean, who was peeking through the crack in the open door. He smiled wide, and neither of us made a sound while the pigeon wrapped her tiny toes around the branch, testing for the first time how it felt to leave the ground.

And then one day when I entered the bin, instead of simply hopping, both birds spread their wings, and slowly, so slowly they seemed to be defying physics, they both pulled themselves into the air. One landed a few seconds later with a bounce, but the other drifted for a moment, circling my head in slow motion, reaching and pulling, reaching and pulling, until she was at the hole in the roof, and then outside it.

I rushed out, picking up the Bean as I scurried past.”Did you see her? Did you see her?” I asked him.

“Baby bird flying!” He shouted in reply. We circled the grain bin, looking for the baby. I was scared she had fallen into the grass, easy prey for cats, but instead she was perched on the circular rim of the bin, head cocked, scanning the horizon.

She peered up for a few more seconds, the whole world a giant bowl over her head, before ducking down and diving back into the safety of the bin. The Bean, his eyes as blue as the sky, turned to me, and said,”Baby bird, not a baby anymore.”

I often fear I am a foolish woman. Sometimes I know that I am. Like when I am climbing into a stinky, old grain bin to chase sensory-deprived baby pigeons around. But every once in awhile my foolishness pays off. How else would I have gotten to see the look that appears on a small boy’s face when he sees a fledgling bird fly for the first time? The look of surprised delight as he falls a little more in love with the world and all its wonders.

For my part, I value the reminder that small kindnesses are rarely small and learning to fly comes in many forms.

Editor’s Note: Accidental Rancher is available for $14.95 plus shipping and handling. This excerpt is revised from the May/June 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Happy Places

By Christian Begeman

Late May is more often than not a magical time in South Dakota. Spring sunshine and new life bring shades of green and wildflower accents to our landscapes. It’s a welcome change to the subdued hues of winter and early spring. As a guy who wrestles with wanderlust and a camera, it is one of the best times of the year to get out and explore. This is why it has become a standing tradition for me to use the long Memorial Day weekend to get on the road and discover as much spring beauty as possible.

This year, I left the city as soon as I could break away from work on May 21 with a specific destination in mind. Badlands National Park in the golden hour just before the sun sets is something every South Dakotan should witness. The warm light from the low sun in the northwest can color the badlands formations into an artist’s palette of light, shadow and color. I arrived at the park with about 45 minutes of sunlight left in the day and was immediately transfixed by the rugged beauty of the place. The cares of the last few months faded into the background and I was there … the proverbial happy place.

This year, a couple new finds highlighted the photography expedition. I noticed flowering larkspur was abundant in the southern Black Hills and finally got a decent photo of that richly purpled beauty. Also, I was surprised to find edible morel mushrooms just outside my cabin near Legion Lake in Custer State Park. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure they were morels; they were tinged black and I had never seen that before. Turns out they are burn morels. They appear in an area burned with fire the previous year, and, according to a little research, they are some of the better tasting morels you will ever pluck from the ground.

Almost every year when I make this trip, I’m treated to a spring thunderstorm crashing over the southern hills of Custer State Park and this year was no exception. There is something about rolling thunder coupled with the smell of rain on the wind that I deeply love. These fast-moving storms are a true feast for the eyes, ears and nose. Thankfully no hail found me as in years past. Wildflowers, butterflies and bumblebees, on the other hand, were abundant across the rolling prairie. And apparently so was love, as I happened upon a tom turkey strutting his stuff on the Oak Draw road.

My trek also took me north through Butte and Harding counties, then through Perkins and Corson to visit my folks in Mobridge. This was the land of my youth, and the open vistas and sweeping landscapes are still home to me. Prairie windmills, low morning fog, mule deer, pronghorn and short-eared owls all made appearances along the way. It was another memorable few days in the 605 and I can’t wait to do it again.

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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West River Odyssey

By Christian Begeman

My immediate family gathered this month in Mobridge. It was the first time we’d all been together in several years. From a family of six on the farm to a family of more than 20 scattered from Sioux Falls to California seems pretty amazing, but probably not that uncommon. I grew up roughly 60 miles west and 10 miles south of Mobridge near the Moreau River breaks. I don’t get back in that country near enough, but this was a good year to go. The rain has been abundant and the wildflowers profuse. Last season was dry, and it seems all that stunted life from a year ago has burst into its fullest measure this time around.

Before heading home, I took a notable detour to the beautiful Matthews Opera House in Spearfish to take in my friend Eliza Blue’s new album release concert. From there I wandered down through Custer State Park, where I reveled in a summer thunderstorm (until a few large hailstones caused me to flee south into Wind Cave National Park). Then I spent a day and a half in the Badlands, where I had good luck watching burrowing owls take care of their young. After that, I made my way north to the rolling hills of Perkins and Corson counties.

The real surprise of the journey was an impromptu photo tour just northwest of Bison. Sion Hanson is a friend of a friend who asked if I’d be willing to take some photos of him and some of the landmarks on his land for his grandkids. Hanson turned 60 this year and wants to pass along a little bit of the family history and legacy in images as well as stories. I didn’t quite know what to expect as we pulled out of the yard and headed north along a wheat field through the tall grass. Then we crested the hill.

As I mentioned, I grew up near the rugged and rolling hills of the Moreau River breaks along the Dewey and Ziebach county line, so I have a near-and-dear appreciation for the long draws and short grass hills topped with gravel, yucca and Black Samson flowers (also known as wild purple coneflower). What now opened before us was the south edge of the Grand River breaks, and it was breathtaking. The short grass prairie had taller than normal grass waving in the wind, and it was ablaze with wildflowers, particularly Black Samson. One of the long draws before us was where Hanson’s grandfather and grandmother had a sod house built back when the land opened for settlement in the early 1900s. Hanson’s granddad was a freight wagon driver who hauled goods to Bison from the nearest train depot to the north. Each trip was a two-day journey. We saw parts of the old road from Bison to Hettinger that survived as a fire trail, at least into the 1970s. It is mostly overgrown now.

It was an unexpected and enjoyable trip to some of our state’s truly wide-open and rugged country. To hear the history of it as well as help a new friend keep the stories and places alive for his family was quite an honor. Those couple hours of looking over the land, reminiscing and simply enjoying the view was a good reminder of how strong the family unit was and still is in these open prairies of our great state. It was only fitting that my next few days of vacation were spent making new memories with my own family at the end of this summer’s West River odyssey.

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

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West River Paradise

By Christian Begeman

I spent the 2017 Memorial Day weekend immersed some of our state’s most iconic scenery. Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, Badlands National Park, Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park are inspiring any time of the year, however there is something even more special about these places in spring. The grass is greener, the sky is bluer and the clouds seem to move faster. The heartbeat of renewed life on the high plains is simply more intense.

That said, I wasn’t so sure about my decision on Friday when I arrived in the Badlands. It was cloudy and overcast. The only interesting scene I found was a lone bull bison grazing along the Sage Creek Wilderness Area rim road. Saturday morning was chilly, cloudy and didn’t seem a whole lot better for photo opportunities, so I slept in. By the time I got back out into the Badlands, rays of sunshine starting poking through the clouds as they raced east. I saw six burrowing owls in the Badlands and grasslands that day. The closest was a bit sulky. He was stooped over and voicing his mating call. It had rained overnight, which left the early wildflowers bejeweled with small raindrops. Things were looking up. The sky soon turned deep blue with happy white clouds sailing across from the northwest.

That evening, just as the crescent moon was setting, the Northern lights began to flare. It was clearing to the southeast and the Milky Way rising above the pinnacles of the Badlands provided amazing views one way, while the pale arc of Aurora in the north added an eerie, but beautiful view to the north. I was on the leeward side of the pinnacles for most of the time, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever heard such silence. It was almost a revelation to hear nothing whatsoever under the starry sky.

I slept in again the next morning. Chasing the stars will make a guy sleepy. I arrived at Custer State Park about mid-morning and wandered around the new visitor center. The sound of the creek running and birds singing made the sunny morning one of those times where you just want to sit down and watch the butterflies go by. Later, I looked for pincushion cactus blooming along the Red Valley Road in Wind Cave National Park. I’ve checked for the last six years and always seem to miss the bloom by a week or so. This time, I found three or four just starting to bud. My grandmother loved these plants, and would sometimes take my brothers and me on expeditions along the Moreau River breaks looking for them. When we found some, she would delicately transplant them into her garden.

As I was down amongst the flowers a spring thundershower arrived with thunderclaps that echoed along the valley. The smell of rain on the breeze signaled that it was time to get in the truck and find a nice spot to sit out the shower. I can’t decide if I prefer the smell of rain before or after in West River country. If anybody can figure out how to bottle that smell, I’d be the first in line to buy.

That evening, I began the trip home chasing more rain showers. I took a side trip north of Oacoma at sunset to capture the last sunset of my quick trip to paradise … I mean West River.

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

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South Dakota: Superpower

By Paul Higbee

The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site is a reminder of the weapons that dotted the West River landscape during the Cold War.

I’m the product of a Cold War childhood. The realization hit me while visiting several Minuteman missile sites scattered around West River. All sorts of memories flooded my mind: duck and cover drills, grade school lectures about Communism, wishing my family had a bomb shelter — not because I feared attack but because entertaining friends in a bomb shelter sounded cool.

And then there was Ann, my neighbor and fourth grade classmate, blonde and remarkably long-armed. What I remember best about Ann is her smiling and kind face, which, for me, was the very face of the Cold War.

Let me explain. Ann’s family, like mine, lived in St. Paul in the early 1960s. My family moved there from Iowa while hers originally hailed from one of the Soviet states. With her long arms, she threw a baseball harder than any other kid I knew, not that she cared about the sport itself or could identify Killebrew from Khrushchev. But she played a good game of catch and her delivery turned my fingers purple through my mitt’s thick leather. I don’t recall her last name or, actually, her first. Ann was short for something she decided her American peers only mangled. Sometimes I saw her around the neighborhood with her father, so I recognized him one winter afternoon as he stepped into a barbershop where I waited my turn. Ann’s father and the barber started needling one another in friendly fashion, something that sounded like a regular routine between them. Americans, I recall Ann’s dad declaring, liked their candies too sweet and their beers too sparkly. And even Minnesotans had no idea what a real winter — a Russian winter — felt like.

“Soft,” he said.”I hate the Soviet government but I fear America is too soft to resist it. Especially Russian women are tough. They alone could defeat America.”

For a while that remark shaped my thinking of a potential U.S.-Soviet war. I imagined full-grown, strong-armed Anns marching out of the north, scoffing at the Minnesota winter, tossing grenades with tremendous force.

I first heard of the Cold War a couple years earlier when my family still lived in Iowa. From a dark field west of Indianola one night, in the company of several other families, we waited for a freshly launched American satellite to pass over. I think maybe I saw it, but there were lots of twinkling lights up there. The next day my second grade teacher explained why that satellite was important. If the United States fell behind Russia in space and elsewhere, she said, we would end up living under Communism. Many of my classmates were farm kids and this teacher hit a nerve when she defined Communism as a way of life where you might still live and work on a farm, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t own the farm or tractors or crops or livestock. (Though Communism never reached Iowa, I remembered her remarks decades later when I read about Iowa farm families going to work for corporate agricultural operations.)

Not long after we watched the satellite, my family moved to St. Paul, just in time for the Cuban missile crisis and duck-and-cover drills at school. When a drill began, each student was issued a laminated nametag. The lamination, we grade schoolers whispered in awed tones, was so the tags would survive and our charred bones could be identified after a Russian attack. No one hassled Ann about her heritage. She was one of us as she took her tag and ducked and covered out in the school hallway, under the coat racks.

It wasn’t until after my family moved to South Dakota, the very year many of the Minuteman missiles were being lowered into West River silos, that I learned the truth about a potential U.S.-Soviet hot war. There wouldn’t be any grenade-tossing Russian women but instead rockets delivering heat no laminated nametag could survive. And because there were 150 American missiles in western South Dakota each aimed at a Soviet target, we would be hit early. I’d be vaporized before my former St. Paul classmates lined up to duck and cover, and no one, Communist or free, would farm our radioactive fields for a long while.

Strangely, none of that troubled me. Mostly I just put it out of my head as I think most South Dakotans did. Or we joked about our state ranking among the top seven nuclear powers on earth, or took genuine patriotic pride in serving on the front line of an unusual war. And I knew people who adamantly believed living amid missiles was a small price to pay for the dependable, affordable electrical service their maintenance guaranteed. One thing for sure — maybe we liked our candies sweet and our beers sparkly, like other Americans. But living in western South Dakota, where nuclear warheads literally outnumbered towns, we never heard anyone say we weren’t tough.

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the May/June 2007 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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West River Wintertime

Winter is settling in over the Black Hills, bringing many opportunities for beautiful photography. John Mitchell, Spearfish, has been exploring the frosty nooks and crannies in his neck of the woods. Here are some of his recent shots.