RoadtripPart 3: South Dakota, Black Hills |
Part 1:
first leg to Hybridfest
Part 2: local Wisconsin tourism and slightly beyond Part 3: South Dakota, Black Hills Part 4: bangin' around the Northwest Part 5: meandering east toward Denver Part 6: doing tech at Denvention (aka Worldcon) Part 7: the journey home |
The next morning I awoke to something scampering around on the roof of the car, but whatever it was dove off and vanished before I could open the door and raise the camera above the roofline. Well, it was time to get up anyway. |
By 0800 I had picked my way out of Presho through a thick blanket of fog that had descended overnight. It continued for quite a few miles that morning. |
It is entirely possible to pulse-n-glide on a gravel road, albeit much harder
to hear anything that's going on with the engine. It was sort of scary that
this particular road has a *45* MPH posted speed limit, which seems
awfully high even if it is arrow-straight. I was still raising a good dust
plume behind me at something less than that, but what was more interesting was
the fairly radical wheel speed difference I observed between front and back on
the delta indicator.
Dry pavement shows a little bit of that too because of the torque difference
and a little bit of tire squirm, but apparently when the front wheels are
churning gravel even under light load, they spin quite a bit faster than the
rears that are just along for the ride.
When I stopped out here, it was very quiet. Not even much in the way of cricket or grasshopper noises. |
Back on the highway again, and evidently getting into some more weather. |
I didn't notice this billboard until much later when processing the previous picture, and could only extract a bad blowup of it but it's readable enough to be pretty amusing. I suspect that most of the wildlife that may need to be "managed", in their estimation, isn't generally sought for its fur in the first place. |
This "pinch bug" wandered straight out of the pages of "Tom Sawyer" and into the middle of this road. |
Finally, I made it into the Badlands. |
The view back toward the northeast shows how it rises out of the prairie, or more properly is slowly being washed back *into* the prairie. |
The red and yellow mounds reveal some of the oldest layers, and of course newer erosion causes the colors to cross-bleed. |
The same effect, but on a larger scale. |
... the medium-size ones ... |
Eventually, the water channels widen out to large gullies and canyons. |
The people give more sense of scale here. |
... which is one of these dandelions. They're everywhere around here, and they're HUGE -- like 3 inches across, unlike the inch or so wide ones back east. |
The obligatory butt(e) shot. |
This was taken more for the sky than the hills, but again shows the layering and the fact that some layers are more resistant to eroding forces. |
Without some reference, it's hard to get a sense of the size of anything. Here it's maybe a couple hundred feet to the top of the ridge. |
Some isolated little spikes, either the last melted remnants of larger hills or new ones just beginning to be exposed. |
A ridge with a hole eroded through it. |
At this point I had reached the eastern end of the park and the thunderstorm
had wandered away a while ago, so I had traveled the past couple of hours with
the windows open and the sun beating down. It was *HOT*. The black Prius
dashboard under that huge expanse of sloped windshield tends to collect a
*lot* of heat which slowly works its way through the entire volume of the
dash. Bringing in outside air with the fan doesn't really help, but today I
made an interesting discovery. Putting the system on *recirculate* mode pulls
air from somewhere inside the dash and blows it out the vents, and that
actually helps push away some of that built-up heat. It even helps to open
both glovebox lids and let air get pulled through there; I found that my owners
manual and stack of maps was acting like a big heat-retaining insulator
after that much solar influx.
I hadn't quite gotten to the point of just caving and using the A/C -- I wanted to keep in closer touch with this whole environment, which meant hearing it, smelling it, and feeling it. Windows open, less of that human isolation that closed cars so easily create. I exited the park and onto 44, passing by the town of Interior which appears to be a few trailers and shacks scattered around -- not much to it. I headed west on 44, sort of doubling back to the south of the main Badlands area. |
I passed through a short and relatively uninteresting piece of it, and then back into the flatlands. |
I went into the center of town.
View the big picture to get my take on it... |
Having seen no actual living people in Scenic, I got back on the road. 44 goes very straight here, and definitely had that "big sky" look going today. |
More strange lawn art. I guess in these areas where fossils are a big deal, people often think of dinosaurs. |
I also noticed some behavioral changes in the car. At higher
altitudes the vacuum gauge would sink a tick or two lower for the same power
output, and it was clear that the engine was gasping a bit harder for breath.
The vac level was also lower during warp-stealth segments. This was not an
artifact of less dense air around me, because if you think about it that would
have made the gauge go *higher* toward less pressure. Instead I was seeing
generally lower vacuum in operation, meaning more throttle opening commanded
from the ECU.
For some reason the battery state of charge was also generally hanging lower than usual, down around 4 bars in the display instead of 6. Which makes *no* sense at all since the car actually has no barometric sensor, and thus no knowledge of altitude or ambient pressure, and there is no reason the hybrid controller would need to seek any other steady-state level than its usual 60%. I was't forcing the system to use any more battery than usual, even going up hills. Now, sometimes it was nice to have the additional overhead available for regen on the way down, but it's not like the car can possibly anticipate anything about upcoming terrain. [If Toyota's working on topo-GPS-based cruise control efficiency hacks, such a thing is certainly not in this car...] But something was definitely going on in terms of the car's overall operation. The next morning I headed for the next major waypoint, the house of a friend-of-a-friend outside of Rapid City. He lives way up one of the narrow canyons around there, which made for an interestingly wiggly journey up a one-lane gravel/dirt road to find his place. This is one of those roads that hugs the side of a creek all the way up and jumps across a couple of times to find the flattest terrain on either side, and must have been a heck of a lot of work to carve into the side of the valley and build the bridges across. |
It's a gorgeous setting. The creek runs right through his backyard, and when I got there I just waded right into it and took a picture upstream. This is what he gets to look at all day. |
A cute little swimming-hole, whose depth can vary from zero to several feet in the span of a couple of weeks. |
There are many interesting overhangs, and farther up we encountered some climbers who had hiked in a good couple of miles to find and play on more stuff like this. |
This climbing aid looked really old and sketchy to me, but my host said "it's fine, I've used it before" and went right on up. |
A patch of extraordinarily green moss on a shaded rock. |
Here too, the poison ivy is everywhere and was the main impediment against
my idea of bushwhacking our way up to the canyon rim. DWI [driving while
itching] is never a good idea.
When we got back to the house we threw *all* our hiking clothes into the laundry and encouraged the dog to jump in the creek and get sort of a bath because she'd been diving headfirst through all the nasty stuff and by that point was likely a walking urushiol bomb. |
I stayed here for two very mellow days, and then got going again with a plan to briefly see some of the other major sights around the area, miss some others, and get myself more westward. At this point I was actually within a day's shot of Denver where my next scheduled event would be, but with a week and some in between I had a good amount of road-trippin' ahead and no need to head that way yet. |
I had been spotting these signs all through South Dakota, but none of them close enough to read. Since they are often near the omnipresent barbed-wire fences, I figured they had something to do with the wisdom of trespassing on someone else's ranch. Finally here was one I could conveniently stop and examine. They're the equivalent of roadside memorials but officially placed by the state, marking places where a traffic fatality occurred. Sometimes I'd see two of them right next to each other, and even more perplexing is how many of them are off the side of a perfectly straight and open piece of interstate. Evidently there's a big problem with DUI, and I don't mean itching. Here's a trucker's take on them, and a report on what some other states are similarly doing. |
Now properly aligned with unseen forces, I also dropped into the parking lot of the Cosmos Mystery Area, and without even getting out of the car I spotted what appeared to be an exercise in mass hypnosis going on up in the woods with a guide having everyone stand in a circle and wave their arms around. I decided to give it a miss and look it up later; it's just one of many such constructions that exploit forced-perspective to make people think that gravity has shifted or things are different sizes depending on where they sit. This picture from someone else's collection sort of says it all about how such places are constructed. |
They offer helicopter tours of the monument, and bring them back in right over the road. |
Farther down the road is the Crazy Horse monument, which I also skipped paying to go all the way into but to turn around and leave again, I actually had to go in past the gate house a little way for the U-turn which presented this quick picture opportunity. The story behind this is interesting, and one cannot help but wonder if it will ever be done. |
Here's a slightly larger detail, just like numerous other canonical shots of this that people have on their vacation blog sites. The face appears to be pretty much done, and the rest is slowly being blasted out and carved in bits and pieces. There's a pretty visible outline of where the horse head will wind up someday. |
I was a bit southwest of Rapid City by now, and needed to get back up toward
I-90. I backtracked a little and wandered up 385 through Hill City and beyond,
and took a quick left [and then *up*!] into Lead [which I finally found out is
pronounced "leed" like the word used for a good productive vein of ore in a
mine]. The pit is part of the
Homestake
gold mine.
Again, probably plenty of tourist-trap stuff I could have stopped in to see and spend some more hours on, but I made this sort of a flying visit, pausing only to chat with another Priusful of people who pulled in and hand them a flyer. |
Turbo Prius |
It wasn't hard to notice the large number of motorcycles around the area,
tooling around singly and in groups and clearly enjoying the scenery too
[well, when there wasn't this pesky hybrid-whatzit weird thing in the way
doing the speed limit]. It was about a week out from the big yearly bike fest
in Sturgis, and I was undoubtedly seeing plenty of early arrivals.
I finally understand what Sturgis is really all about. It's not just about the camaraderie and hanging out with all the enthusiasts; it's also about the RIDES. Leisurely day loops of a hundred or two miles around the Black Hills can go through some great roads and surroundings and waypoints. Many of these folks were likely giving themselves a little more time to see the area before the big party kicked in, and from what I've seen bikers love the local tourist attractions. My first thought right after that was -- we need to add a similar piece to Hybridfest, and organize some group runs to local destinations which can combine with MPG driving clinics or just plain sightseeing. I suggested a tour of the Saft battery factory in Milwaukee, for example, if such a thing were offered. |
And there were plenty of strange machines in town already -- obviously I wasn't the only one who found this picture-worthy. |
Many visitors were already in town ... |
_H* 081020