Black Hills, South Dakota

Sylvan Lake, Custer State Park

After a good visit in Sioux Falls, we took a couple of days to travel over to the Black Hills area for about a week's stay.  As usual, we started the trip off with rain on Wednesday & spent the night at New Frontier Campground in Presho, SD. We had a pretty Thursday trip over to the Black Hills.  

One view from Rafter J-Bar Ranch

We're at Rafter J-Bar Ranch for the week, one of favorite campgrounds.  It's centrally located (just south of Hill City, SD), which means you do a lot of driving to go do/see things.  We're in the campground's base camp area, but there are several areas and many cabins.  Most rigs seem to be in the base camp area as it has cable TV, close to the playground and restrooms/laundry.  

We've already ate breakfast & completed some shopping in Rapid City, yesterday (Friday).  To complete the day, we walked around Sylvan Lake in Custer State Park and had a great hamburger & fried cheese curds at Burger 'n Bun in Custer, SD.  

Yep, that's part of the Sylvan Lake Trail

As you can see in the picture, above, there's still some ice in the hills and some Custer State Park trails remain closed.  Gift shops are open, but dining doesn't seem to be.  Not sure about actual lodging within the state park. 

Base Camp as seen from the Lower Ranch Camp area

Today is laundry day as it's a rainy (local meteorologists call it a "washout") Mother's Day weekend for South Dakota.  Highs are in the low 50s or high 40s with each night below freezing.  As we have much less wind than earlier in the week, we'll get out some.  Maybe just walk the campground as it's a great place to just walk around.  Campground isn't busy, and they're just now stocking the camp store.  No ice cream, yet, so we've been out looking in other places.

We'll get out more later in the week as the rain dies down and temps start to warm up.  There's ice cream that needs to be eaten, you know.  In the meantime, the campground is a great place to walk if you just want to go outside for a little while.

Tire pressures are hanging in there on the truck.  I-90 was a much better ride than through Minnesota though there's a lot of road work ongoing.  As of this time, some of  eastbound I-90 lanes are dug up and getting a new road bed.  We've only lost one machine screw that holds one of the holding tank's pull handles to the pull rod.  (BTW, those are machine screws 8-32 X 1/2 inch; small head should you ever need one.)  I now have four extras of that screw plus a new, small vice-grip pliers in case we lose the handle.  I'll see if I can get just the handle once we arrive in Jackson.  Generally, once we have replacement parts, we'll never need them.

So you're up to date with us.  Thanks for dropping by and checking up on us.  Until next week, David