Kimberly and I spent a couple of days in the Black Hills of South Dakota over Labor Day weekend.

Here you can see a donkey begging for treats.  This was on the Wildlife Loop in Custer State Park. This is a long drive through a broad stretch of the foothills of the Black Hills. This is where we took the pictures of the buffaloes that you'll see below. (We actually saw quite a few buffalo up in the mountains, too--including quite near our cabin.)

One of the main attractions in Custer State Park is the Needles Highway.

The Needles Highway goes through the Needles (the funny rocks you see in these pictures), and there are several tunnels along the way that are only one lane wide. The picture to the right shows the approach to one of these tunnels.

The tunnels on the Needles Highway are really narrow!

As you can see in the picture shown below, some of the "needles" have "eyes".

The Black Hills are a really complicated place, from a geologic point of view. Most of the rocks that you see in these pictures are spectacularly old--some of the oldest rocks known on Earth, actually. The rocks are a primitive form of granite, with peculiar, HUGE chunks of mica and quartz.

The three pictures shown above are from a hike that we took along the Michelson Trail (a rails-to-trails project that runs across the Black Hills from south to north).

These pictures just give a sense of how high the Black Hills are, compared to the surrounding plains. Mt. Harney, the highest of the Black Hills, is the highest point between the Rockies and the Alps!

The pictures shown above are from Sylvan Lake, which is a nice reservoir near the Needles. There are some really lovely views of this lake--unfortunately, most of my pictures from that morning didn't really turn out.

There was a crew setting up for a wedding along the shores of the lake--it looked quite nice, actually.

Our cabin (above) was GREAT--if you go to the Black Hills, stay at the Blue Bell Lodge and ask for one of the cabins numbered 20 through 29--they are new and VERY nice, with fireplaces, flat-screen TV, kitchens, fire pits... Very nice. They are set a little way off the road, they are reasonably far apart, and they are fairly close to a small store that sells handy stuff like firewood.

Okay, so let's talk about the hats. (I can't believe that we don't to get MORE flack about the hats, frankly.) Kimberly and I ALWAYS forget to bring hats when we go on these trips, so we have a bunch of hats that we ended up buying at places like the gift shops at the Grand Canyon or wherever. This time, we actually remembered to BRING hats, but, sadly, brought these particularly dorky ones.

Actually, scratch all that--I *like* the hats. :-)

I just want to point out that, in the above photo neither of us are wearing our hats.

Those last few pictures are from Legion Lake, which is another one of the reservoirs in Custer State Park. It's small--we walked all the way around it in less than an hour.

Notice the ducks. If you look through my other Tabblos, you'll see that I almost always manage to get a picture of ducks. You'll have to ask me sometime about ducks.