Day # 6 - Mt. Rushmore

Big day! We started by driving through the Custer National Forest and the Wind Cave Preserve. We were hoping to get a glimpse of a buffalo. Man…did we ever get more than a glimpse. We were driving along the road and there right by the side of the street were 5 adult buffalo grazing. We slowed and I managed to creep up to about 10 feet away! We just sat there for several minutes looking and taking pictures. Seeing animals at a Zoo is great, but seeing these buffalo in the wild was really cool. Sarah was especially excited and we had to keep reminding her to keep her voice down for fear of spooking them. She was really into the buffalo.

When we saw the Buffalo we were on our way to another activity that we had picked out for Sarah. It was the “Mammoth Site” in Hot Springs, SD. I was really impressed with it. 40 years ago while excavating for a housing development; they found several petrified Woolly Mammoth bones. They have since discovered more than 50 mammoth skeletons in a very small area that was a sinkhole around 26,000 years ago. They have built a catwalk around the actual excavation site and a tour guide takes you around and points things out. It was pretty cool. There is an interactive room set up at the end that discusses how the Mammoths lived, and most likely reasons so many of them got trapped in the sinkhole. There are also several displays of how humans hunted and used the various parts of the Mammoth for their survival.

On the way back we took a tour of the Wind Cave. It is a dry cave about 20 stories underground. Missy is usually not fond of small spaces, but she did fine. It was actually me who struggled. That was because it was my job to keep hold of AJ. At almost 3 years old he has no sense of danger and I really had to work to keep a grip on him going down the stairs (all 300 of them) and over the walkways in the cave. The cave was neat and most of it was large enough that it didn’t seem to freak-out anyone in our group of about 25 people. Still, after wrangling the Whirling Dervish for over an hour, I was glad to get to the elevator at the end of the tour.


After the cave everyone was pretty worn out. We went back to the camper for naps for the 2 little ones and some downtime for the 3 bigger ones. Around dinner time the weather finally started to clear and the sun peeked through the clouds. Since the girls had been asking about roasting marshmallows, I went to the camp office and bought a couple of small bundles of firewood. The kids played on the very nice playground for a while and then we had dinner (spaghetti and sausages) and roasted marshmallows. It was a good day.