Vacation to South Dakota

Day 3 - A cave, a mine, and a train

Yesterday we spent the day at Keystone, a mining town that now serves as the home base for tourists visiting Mount Rushmore. I've rarely visited tourist traps, so it was a fun adventure.

The first half of the day we spent underground. After a delicious breakfast of pumpkin-pecan pancakes at Whitetail Ridge B&B,

we headed out to Beautiful Rushmore Cave. The facilities were pretty dumpy, and the gift shop looked like it was stuck in the 1950s. The shelves, flooring, even the gifts looked like they hadn't changed in all those years. The cave was beautiful, however, and the tour was interesting.

The cave was first discovered when gold miners accidentally came across the entrance in 1876. When the miners abandoned the cave, after realizing it contained no gold, it was left open and teenagers from the area adopted it as a hangout. Over time, they explored more and more of the cave, crawling through narrow tunnels clogged with dirt and clay to discover several new rooms. In one room, they carved their names into the rock walls. After years of visits from local teens, the walls became so cluttered with names that it seemed as if the whole town roster was carved into the walls. Today this room is known as the Post Office. The next room they discovered became a favorite haunt, and the kids, who had nothing to do after they crawled deep into the cave, spent their time finding animals in the rock formations. Our tour guide showed us rock formations that looked like a horse and a rabbit, and one that looked like the alien Alf from a 1980s sitcom.

Today the cave is fully excavated and the tour required only occassional ducking as we walked up and down the 440 stair steps that have been built to make it easier to climb up and down between the maze of rooms. I'm always amazed at how people will crawl around through dark, damp holes in the earth and explore with no lights and no idea what they will find. I'm barely able to go through a tour in a well explored, well lit cave.

After we finished the cave tour, we drove into Keystone and stopped at the Big Thunder Gold Mine and spent more time underground. This mine was started by 2 German men in their thirties. With only one pick, one sledge hammer, and gun powder, these two men spent over half of their lives excavating the mine by the light of a single candle. After 35 years, they had stumbled across the tail ends of 2 different veins of gold, both belonging to other nearby claims and containing very little gold in the area where the 2 men were digging. In the end, they made only about $60 each, for a lifetime of work.

After spending the entire morning inside the earth, we decided to spend the rest of the day outside. We took the 1880s train from Keystone to Hill City. It was a 10 mile one-way trip, and took from 2:30 until 5:00, with a 20 minutes stop over in Hill City. The train has been featured in several TV shows and films, including Gunsmoke and the current Into The West mini series. It was a beautiful ride, through the Black Hills National Forest and past several old mining sites.

By the time the train came back, it was time for dinner and then we went back to the B&B to watch an episode of Into The West, but I fell asleep halfway through the episode.