Of GPS and Devil's Tower

Yesterday, another beautiful sunny day, I rode nothe from Rapid city to Sturgis. Anyone who knows anything about motorcycles has heard of Sturgis South Dakota, a small town that is invaded by an army, nearly 500,000 bikers for the last week of July and the first couple of weeks in August. This year marks the 73rd year that a rally ais held in Sturgis. It's hard to imagine how a small town can manage such an event, but it's a huge deal. More timid bikers, or those who simply want to avoid the chaos of rally days, are always welcome in a place that bills itself as: A City of Riders. This old bank building located on Main Street now houses one of the many souvenir/bike stuff shops in town.

Riding North through places like St Onge and belle Fourche one soon crosses into the State of Wyoming and the landscape changes as well. There are more mountains as one goes through a part of the Black Hills National Forest where the Bear Lodge Mountains are located. One interesting discovery is  the Fine Arts and Antiques Rogues Gallery in the very small town of Hullet. Definitely the work of a madman proprietor. How else to explain the outside jail cell and the wooden caskets that you can try on for size or the hundreds of sets of weathered deer antlers that decorate the outside porch pillars.

 But the rea reason to take this route lies 10 miles down the round, though you can see it nearly as soon as you leave the town heading south on Route 24. It,s Devil's Tower, a column of magma with a diameter of 1,000 feet at the base that stands more than 1200 above the surrounding terrain. It's awe inspiring. People have been coming to visit the Tower for ages, and climbers have been scaling the 120 routes to the top since 1893.

As a national monument the site of Devil's Tower is managed by the National Park Service, and they do an amazing job of it. The $5 entry fee is a bargain.

Driving south back towards Rapid City on a road with numerous "Careful Winding Road for the Next 3 Miles" signs that make me smile and think of my son Pierre-Alain and his wife Michèle who I am sure would take the curves at a much faster clip than I do, you drive through the town of Deadwood South Dakota, a place that's famous because it's where Wild Bill Hickok met his fate in a poker game.

About GPS', well that promised arrival of a replacement unit didn't happen; and given that I found out after five and that the service department of Garmin International doesn't operate on weekends, or holidays, I have to wait till Monday morning to find out what gives. AARRRGGHH!

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