Rapid City, Devils Tower and on to Billings

July 30 -- Today was a perfect touring day. The weather was bright, sunny and warm but not humid.

I liked where I was in downtown Rapid City. It had lots of cafes and shops of various types and also had various presidents standing around. The city uses the tag line "City of Presidents" evidently because many presidents have stayed there. Also, they have statues of various presidents decorating various street corners in the area. There were other Native American sculptures as well.







After having breakfast I walked down to the City Hall (again, the hotel was conveniently placed). I struck out with getting a zoning map to take with me. However, they did have a huge map (something like 5ft x 5ft) on the wall that they've been updating for years (colors of some of the areas were faded). They let me take a picture, so I can show you the type of maps I'm collecting. It's beginning to look like the days of paper zoning maps are numbered. They are moving online, but sometimes not in a very user-friendly form.

Finally, for Rapid City, I ran into this sign on a storefront. It's for a gun shop named "First Stop Guns". Being previously from California, I thought this was actually a protest sign at first. Understandable with a slight change in punctuation - "First, Stop Guns!"




Here's a slideshow of the photos from my time in Rapid City, South Dakota.






After about two hours and a stop for directions I made it to Devil's Tower. At first I was concerned because the parking was a bit crowded. However, once I got on the trail around the tower the number of people was quite reasonable - only a handful at a time were visible. I took the short loop around the tower which is about 1.3 miles. It took about 45 minutes which wasn't bad given that the trail was up and down plus there were information signs all around, as well as stopping to take pictures. I wanted to make a 360 degree view of the tower, but that will take a bit long, so I picked one of the best from the bunch of pictures I have for this post.

On the way out I stopped a few times to get some "arrival" shots of the tower (most people were stopping for these shots as they arrived). However, one stop was to tell people about pairiedogs. There were lots of rules about don't feed, don't approach, etc. seemingly to prevent the critters from getting too friendly and walking onto the road and getting squashed. Unfortunately, the ones I saw seemed to be very comfortable around people and cars, which I don't think was the result conservationists were after.

After going around the tower and getting some things at the gift shop I headed out of the monument and had a late lunch. Although I had a bottle of water for my walk, I should have had something to eat before I started the expadition. After that it was off to Billings. Flat plains are long gone, but no big mountains either, although a couple of the descents did pop my ears.

I probably won't post on Friday as I will won't have an internet connection. I'll try to post over the weekend, but I should be back on Monday evening at the latest.



Here's a slideshow of the photos from my time at Devils Tower.

TTFN

Ted