We drove down to the Black Hills of South Dakota and found room at a campground on Lake Sheridan. It is a national forest campground and our site looked right down on the lake with a great view of the skiers and nice area to view the sunsets.
Everything in the Black Hills area is fairly easy to get too and not the far away from where we were staying. We first went to the Mt Rushmore Monument. We did not realize that it had been many years since we had been there. Now they have a 2 or 3 level parking garage and it was almost full. We must have hit the time of year that it starts getting very busy as the monument was full of people. We took a short hike on the trail that runs underneath the monument and gave us a great view of the faces from different angles.
My folks came up from Scottsbluff for the day and we went to lunch with them in Hill City and had a good visit. They went to Custer State Park for the rest of the day and we went over to Jewel Cave to visit it. We found out that you need to reserve your tickets ahead of time so we bought them for the next day and went back.
The Jewel Cave hike was very interesting!! we went down in elevators to 379 feet below the surface to begin the tour. The formations were very interesting, it was hard to take good photos as we werent allowed to take tripods but I managed to get a few good ones. It was a total of 750 steps, most of them down so it wasnt really that hard of a trip thru the cave. It maintains a nice even temp of around 49 deg which was cool but not too bad. The Cave is now the second largest cave in the world due to over 150 miles being explored on several levels. It is amazing that they have found that many miles of passages. I highly recommend this tour if you ever get the chance!!
Everything in the Black Hills area is fairly easy to get too and not the far away from where we were staying. We first went to the Mt Rushmore Monument. We did not realize that it had been many years since we had been there. Now they have a 2 or 3 level parking garage and it was almost full. We must have hit the time of year that it starts getting very busy as the monument was full of people. We took a short hike on the trail that runs underneath the monument and gave us a great view of the faces from different angles.
My folks came up from Scottsbluff for the day and we went to lunch with them in Hill City and had a good visit. They went to Custer State Park for the rest of the day and we went over to Jewel Cave to visit it. We found out that you need to reserve your tickets ahead of time so we bought them for the next day and went back.
The Jewel Cave hike was very interesting!! we went down in elevators to 379 feet below the surface to begin the tour. The formations were very interesting, it was hard to take good photos as we werent allowed to take tripods but I managed to get a few good ones. It was a total of 750 steps, most of them down so it wasnt really that hard of a trip thru the cave. It maintains a nice even temp of around 49 deg which was cool but not too bad. The Cave is now the second largest cave in the world due to over 150 miles being explored on several levels. It is amazing that they have found that many miles of passages. I highly recommend this tour if you ever get the chance!!
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