Oh Canada!

Ah, there’s nothing you want more at 7:45am on Canada Day than the sweet smell of horses stables, housing almost eighty horses. It’s positively warm and fuzzy. Thus begins our day of a trail ride at 8:00am sharp, with the added bonus of having to be there fifteen minutes early for fear of losing your booked horse. We were there right on time, however, dressed in our cowboy best, ready to impress the trees along our route. I had the honour of riding on Papoose, the lead mare of the group, and very stubborn. We had to ride second from the front because she doesn’t follow, she only leads and even then, she was as out of line with the leader and the mustang in front of us as it was possible to be. The trail was very pretty, out on the hour and a half long Elkhorn Trail in the woods, excepting the fact that I discovered I am quite allergic to the species we know as horses. Hurrah! Goodbye any future I could have had with a horse in it. That’s horses and cats now. What’s next, frickin aardvarks? Anyways, after that refreshing morning walk in which my tear ducts swelled up nicely we head back to rescue the dog once again and then set out for the Crazy Horse memorial. Now the Crazy Horse memorial is yet another carving into yet another mountain and construction has already been underway for over fifty years. It is not a federally funded project, as they so kindly pointed out upward of ten times and the goal seems to be to outdo Mount Rushmore. The original carver died in ’82 but, like on Rushmore, his kids are carrying out the project. In this case, though, there are ten

kids. The monument is so big, all four heads on the Rushmore carving can fit in to the single head and hair of the chief Crazy Horse, who was stabbed in the back during a truce in the battle of Little Bighorn. The carving represents Crazy Horse on his horse pointing towards his lands. It’s a huge structure and the arm alone is 263ft long. Kind of a ridiculous thing to do. They don’t even have an estimated date of completion, but I think at least another twenty years. We took a bus tour to the bottom of the mountain along a road that was built out of a portion of the granite that was blasted off and then crushed. They use giant bulldozers to push the accumulating rock around, and one of the carver’s sons fell off the side of the slope in one of them, right over his father’s head. He survived the fall, luckily, by jumping out of the thing before it started to fall in earnest. A fun place full of fun times. The carver is buried on site, right by his original house he built when he was working by himself in the ‘40s. There is also a one room schoolhouse nearby, where his children completed their education. The entire area is a reservation for the Native American tribe, the Lakota. After we looked through the museum and went to the restaurant for some traditional food (I had a bison stew, with bannock), we went for a drive along Needles Highway, a very twisty turny highway with little tunnels, on our way to South Dakota’s Sylvan Lake. Now, this lake is very much nicer than our own with the same same and is surrounded by massive outcroppings of rock, one of which is

christened Lover’s Leap, meant for cliff diving into the water. It’s a good place for fishing also. And it is also the creation of man after someone decided to build a dam, which is kind of cool because it looks so very natural. Kizzy enjoyed the area. I like the rocks, there were lots of caves to traverse and explore, which is my kind of thing. I didn’t have the forethought to bring my swimsuit, however, because I wasn’t

certain we were going to stop, but it would have been nice to go swimming, despite the reeds. After we completed an entire circle around the lake, we finished the loop that is Needles Highway, named for the spires of rock alongside it, and headed back for dinner. After that, our destination was Keystone, the second of the two towns flanking Rushmore. I actually preferred Keystone to Hill City. I though it had some cooler stuff and was just organized more nicely. We were supposed to do some mini-golf, a free extra provided to us by the KOA, but I had mistakenly taken the receipt inside the trailer and left it, so that ruled out that option. We ended up wandering the town. I went to look inside an emporium, which was rather eccentric, and we passed by a sweet shop selling lots of chocolatey products that smelled amazing. All our things to do more or less complete, it was now our humble duty to do the dishes and light a campfire before our night was up and our beds called to us. We were all sleeping soundly, when suddenly, thunder at one o’clock in the morning. How lovely. So the dog was trembling in a corner, and mum and dad had to solve the minor issue of water pouring in through the open trailer vents. So the night turned out to be just as eventful as the day. It was the Black Hills’ way of saying “Sayonara suckers”. Thanks Hills. Happy Canada Day to all, and to all a good night. Peace out m8s.

#mountrushmore #blackhills #southdakota #camping