We left Devils Tower before 9 am this morning for Custer, South Dakota. Mt. Rushmore is the main attraction in the hills, but there is also the Crazy Horse memorial, which is a work in progress; then there is Deadwood; Custer State Park; and the two big caves, Jewel and Wind Cave.
We headed into the hills just below Deadwood, which was nice, but it wasn’t at all like the TV show, so we kept going. Also, hard to park a 65′ vehicle in a small town like that.
It was a beautiful ride thru the hills to Custer. We passed by another huge lake on the way there. We are staying at a Horse Ranch Campground, lots of barns and horse trailers, but quite a few RVs too. We were having a hard time finding a place to stay when a coach arrived next to us in Cody. I mentioned we were heading to Mt. Rushmore and were finding it difficult to get a spot to park. He had just been there and told us to try this campground. It’s really nice and doesn’t even show up in the Good Sam app. The pups like all the horses!
We arrived early and decided to check out Wind Cave. Bought some tour tickets and headed into a very cool crevice at 5 pm (54 degrees cool), felt real nice on a 95 degree day. It was a very interesting cave. So far 
they have explored over 147 miles of it. They speculate there may be up to a thousand miles left to explore. There are lots of stairs and low ceilings. I can’t imagine how hard it was to get concrete all the way in there to make the walkways, but it was carried on people’s backs in tire tubes. And they don’t spend much on electricity, pretty dark down there. The ranger had to pass out flashlights at one point due to the lights going out completely. You cannot believe how dark it gets in a cave 200′ below the surface.
They had the most amazing formations in there. These box lattice like things, I’ve never seen anything like it, never even in pictures. The ranger explained it’s only found in 7 caves in the world, and this cave has 90% of all the structures found so far. They explained them as if there was a brick wall and all the bricks were removed, leaving just the mortar. If they were done by a brick layer, they should find another occupation as they were at all angles. And there wasn’t even one stalactite or stalagmite, like I had seen in the only other cave I have been too, Luray Cavern. Went there as a kid on vacation with my parents. It was somewhere in Virginia. This is a dry cave, so it was very different than what I remembered from back then.
Just prior to getting into the cave, we got to experience why it was called Wind Cave. As far as they know, there is only one natural opening into it. It’s a small hole in the rock about 15″ in diameter. There was a stiff breeze blowing out the hole while we were there, maybe 20 mph, and cooler than what blows out of your air-conditioner at home. It all revolves around the air pressure. When there is a storm coming (low pressure) it is really blowing out the hole, and when it’s beautiful outside (high pressure) the hole is like a big vacuum cleaner. There was a big thunderstorm brewing when we got there, so we got to experience the big outbound wind.
