Schedule Slippage (bad); A Chance to Kayak (good)

One thing (among many!) that Rog does very well, is to keep a close eye on the weather. I tend to look outside and take the weather rock approach – if the rock is wet, it’s raining; if it’s white, it’s snowing, etc. – not the best approach when you’re driving a big box down the road. With a weather advisory predicting 30 mph winds and gusts up to 45 mph along our route, we opted to stay another night in Custer.

When we planned this trip, Custer State Park wasn’t even on our radar.  But it really is worth a trip in its own right. The park is huge, with several campgrounds and lodges, lots of wildlife, lakes for kayaking, numerous hiking trails, and scenic drives including the Needles Hwy, Iron Mountain Road, and a wildlife loop with begging burros! We could spend a couple of weeks just doing the state park, so we took advantage of our “extra” day here to kayak on Stockade Lake.

Herds of bison at Custer State Park

Pronghorn Antelope

A herd of  partially tame Burros populates the park.
They are descendants of pack animals originally used in the park and then set loose.

They earn their reputation as "Begging Burros".  

While Stockade Lake isn’t the most scenic lake in the park – both Sylvan and Legion Lake have huge granite cliffs coming right down to the water – it is larger and has fewer people on it.  We spent a couple hours paddling around and saw a pair of osprey fishing and nesting and a pair of blue herons. A much more enjoyable afternoon than battling gale force winds on the freeway! Lol.

Stockade Lake

Happy to be here and not fighting 45 mph winds on the Interstate.

Blue Heron coming in for his lunch.

Osprey

Rocks, water, trees, solitude - perfect kayaking. 

This is the last post for the Black Hills. Our next stop is a boondocking site near Badlands National Park and then it’s a whole lot of nothing across the Midwest until we get to Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio.  I don’t know about you, but until I started doing research for this trip I had never even heard of many the National Parks we plan to visit. Even with a year to travel, we’re only going to hit about half of them.  Gotta leave something to do for later. :)