In the late morning, we headed out for the day's adventures in the Black Hills. Katherine had been hoping for weeks that we would have "Van Church" on this trip, and today she got her wish. We sang some hymns ("This Is The Day", "How Great Thou Art"), we prayed (although I was driving so I kept my eyes open), and I tried to collect an offering. No luck with this bunch. The sermon was each of us sharing something we had learned about God through our trip. Some of the lessons mentioned included that God is powerful, that He likes variety and made many beautiful things, and that He gives us challenges to grow through and overcome.
In the early afternoon, we arrived at Wind Cave National Park. Wind Cave is the 4th largest cave in the world. That sounds pretty impressive until you learn that it is only the 2nd longest cave in its county. Jewel Cave, just down the road, is the 2nd longest cave in the world! Still, we were very happy with our choice of exploring Wind Cave.
Wind Cave has a unique feature called “boxwork” that formed from the erosion within the cave. It kind of looks like a three-dimensional spiderweb. Wind Cave has been mapped to be 129.1 miles long (so far). At ground level is a beautiful wildlife reserve for prairie dogs and bison. 200 feet beneath the surface are fascinating caverns and passages that we traveled through. It was quite cool. The Park prides itself on being "two worlds, one park." It's called Wind Cave because the original, natural opening is quite small and when the air pressure changes outside, wind rushes in or out of the opening. We traveled about 1/4 of a mile underground.
After spelunking, we went to Pizza Hut in Hot Springs for a rather mediocre meal.
Then in the late afternoon it was off to "The Mammoth Site" in Hot Springs. The Mammoth Site is an archeological dig that began in the 1970s with the accidental discovery of mammoth bones during construction work for a planned housing development. It turns out that over 50 mammoths were buried at this site due to a sinkhole that opened up 30,000 years ago when a cave collapsed underneath it (I’m glad I didn’t hear about these collapsing caves before we went to Wind Cave!) The sinkhole filled with water and grass grew around the edge year-round because it was warm (a hot spring). Mammoths approached and, if they fell in the water, they couldn’t get out because of the steep slope. The mud then preserved their bones. Interestingly, all of the trapped mammoths were male and all but one were adolescents. Mammoths belong to the elephant family and apparently elephants are matriarchal. (Boy, do I know how that feels!) So these elephant boys may have been loners, banished from the herd, and wandered to their doom.
The Mammoth Site Foundation built a huge building right over the dig where it is ongoing 7 weeks a year as they painstakingly process the fossils (mammoths and many other small animals) the other 45 weeks. Very interesting!
Bethany and Katherine were picked out of our touring group to hold a mammoth jaw cast and take it around for everyone to touch. Those shoe-tread-looking things are the mammoth's teeth!
And here is Daniel posing with a mammoth thigh bone to give you an idea of how big these creatures were. I bet Toby would love that as a souvenir!
The Mammoth Site was really a lot of fun and very interesting.
We scoured the parking lots of both The Mammoth Site and Wind Cave National Park for a Hawaii license plate, but came up empty. The kids are really starting to get desperate!
On the way back to Custer, the kids clamored to stop at a kiosk/4-sided bulletin board at a motel that had all these state license plates nailed to it. They insisted that finding a Hawaii plate on this kiosk would "count" and that they would thus get their milkshakes. I argued that I wasn't so sure such a find would be considered valid. It didn't matter, anyway, however as they couldn't find Hawaii on it. Still no luck . . .
We returned to the campground and the kids and Jon all went swimming and into the hot tub. The pool was a little cold and buggy, but felt good. The kids thought that was the best part of the day!
At the pool, we met some of our neighbors from cabin #17 (I think it was the John Adams cabin). They were vacationing from "Alliance", Nebraska, and were very curious about our trip and the cost of gas.
After a supper of pizza leftovers and other miscellaneous foodstuffs, we packed up and got ready to depart the next day for our return trip home.
By the way, here's that long-lost video footage of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River:
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