mammoths and a big cave

​Sitting at breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express in Custer SD, we watched a parade of retirees checking out of the hotel, clearly on their own road trips (coolers on luggage carts is the giveaway). So nice to be a stereotype. 
 
The day started at the Mammoth Site (https://mammothsite.org); 140,000 years ago, the forces of nature created an appealing, deep sinkhole filled with water, with sheer sides and sticky mud. Male mammoths (they have found no females!) slid into the hole and couldn’t get out. The result is a paleontology gold mine. They have found 122 tusks, suggesting there are at least 61 skeletons at the site. We chatted with a conservator working on some other Ice Age fossils and a preparator installing a new exhibition. It’s a very cool place. And they had spoon rests!

​Lunch was in Hot Springs, which apparently has been tearing up its streets forever. The ice cream parlor and café offered “bottomless French fries” with your burgers or hotdogs, which we think is a genius idea. It felt good to support a local business through the awful construction. And the fries were excellent.

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​The afternoon was spent at the Wind Cave National Park (the second photo is the original tiny opening: https://www.nps.gov/wica/index.htm). which is an enormous network of narrow passages. There’s no water, so no stalagmites or stalactites, but it has the largest concentration of box work – amazing geometric shapes on the ceiling – in the world. The cave has more than 150 miles of passageways that have been explored, but that is only a small fraction (5 – 10%) of the entire cave network.

The park also has an extensive habitation of prairie dogs. As we were watching them, they started chirping and barking, alerting everyone to the coyote cutting across the field. We also saw some more of the park’s herd of bison and learned that buffalo and bison are the same. 

​The hotel hot tub was a nice way to chill out before dinner. We planned to do the wildlife loop in the state park after dinner, but it got dark quickly.