All National Forests, Bureau of Land Management, select Wildlife Management Areas, and a few other lands have what is called dispersed camping. This means that you can camp on the lands free of charge, if you don’t count the taxes we pay. Each have their own rules to follow, but they are minimal and the camping is awesome, if you are okay with shitting in the woods. There are no toilets, no showers and no drinking water. You have to pack in everything and pack it out.
Tonight we are camping in the Black Hills National Forest in SD. When we entered the forest, we stopped at the ranger station and picked up their detailed maps showing all the places we could drive in and camp. We picked an area on our route, drove in a mile or so (the road is what we would call a class 4 or maybe even a class 5 road at home – 4 wheel drive highly recommended), picked an amazing spot, set-up, turned on the Grateful Dead and cooked dinner.
Viola, a great place to spend a few days and the best part is there isn’t a soul in sight, just trees and hopefully some wildlife.
Pick-up a park map. All the dots are camping spots!Find the road you want to camp on. They are all marked with these little posts.A great camping spot!With great views!
We spent the last few days experiencing The Badlands.
We drove all of the main roads, stopped at almost all of the “viewpoints”, and took more pictures than photography should allow. We camped at the inner primitive Sage Creek Campground for 2 nights surrounded by mother nature and her creatures. And I’m still not sure how one describes it, majestic, awe inspiring, ancient? Desolate, rocky, barren? Windy, hot, overwhelming? All of these adjectives fit and in the vein of Clint Eastwood I have come to think of the Badlands as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
The good: the buffalo roaming through our camping area, the majestic beauty of the formations that were formed so long ago and are constantly changing, the echo of the past all around, the birds and Prairie Dogs, the sheer magnitude of the park, and the amazing people we have been fortunate to meet, once again.
The bad: well, the Indians did call it the Badlands for a reason, the formations are stark, ominous, even cold and sometimes barren looking, they make you feel small and insignificant, they make you think, and feel.
The ugly: the wind initially feels freeing, not to mention cooling, but 72 hours later, the wind is unrelenting, it wears on you, just as the heat did earlier in our trip, but when it stops, the heat is there and you want the wind to blow again, there is no escape from Mother Nature.
I guess you could say the Badlands, like all of us has many facets, some of which aren’t palatable all at once or to everyone. To have been able to briefly experience them all was a gift and something I highly recommend to all. Drive the road, camp in the outback in Sage Creek Campground. Witness the wind, the sun and the amazing sunsets. Spend time alone with the silence and the rocks. Watch the wildlife…watching you. 😄 Experience as much as you can, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it will teach you something new. It certainly did me, and I was only there a few days. I can only imagine what would be learned if one spent some real time amongst the formations.
The majestic formations.We found a troll living in the Badlands!Amazing growth in a land that appears to be barren.The amazing color variations tell the age of the rocks. The yellows are really old!Our campsite, affectionately we called it the Sun’s Anvil?Peeping perv🤣
We’ve had a periodic problem with the fuel system on the Rover. When the system is hot and we stop, restarting, usually on a steep uphill, the fuel line gets an air bubble in it that causes the Rover to be starved of fuel, which like all of us when we are starved, makes us cranky, and in the Rovers case makes her buck like a bronco. We have been a able to avoid stalling by quickly changing the gas to the opposite tank.
Today, we (the proverbial we, which actually means Darrin) are trying for a more lasting solution. Because the metal gas filter sits next to the engine, it gets really hot. We think because of this heat it is causing some expanding, contraction and boiling of the fuel as it heads to the carburetor, thus adding a few air bubbles where they shouldn’t be.
Darrin’s solution is to raid my pantry and insulate the gas filter with a peach can and a soup can. The peach can provides an air gap and the soup can lets air in when the fan turns on. This will hopefully avoid the contracting, heating and air bubbles. (Darrin’s version is much more technical with words like induction, and such. I put it into non-engineering human speak!)
Fingers crossed it works because when the Rover gets cranky, Darrin gets cranky😎
My mechanic at work.All ready for assembly. Soup can, peach can, fuel filter, tinfoil and duct tape.Assembly complete!Installation complete. Fingers crossed!
Last night, as usual, I had to pee in the middle of the night. I unzipped the tent, we were sleeping in the ground tent because if you’ve been to the Badlands you know the wind blows, I mean really blows, I mean hold the tent down or you’re going to parasail to Wyoming blows!
Well anyways, back to my bladder, so I unzipped the tent and crawled out, pulled down my shorts and started to pee when I heard a snort! I looked up and 15 feet away was a huge buffalo watching me pee. What was I to do? They had been roaming in and out of our primitive camping area for 2 days and seemed pretty docile. Should I finish peeing? He seemed calm, but wouldn’t stop staring at me, the perv. What’s a lady to do?
Of course, I finished peeing! Wished him a good night and crawled back into my sleeping bag😁
The buffalo spent the days on the hillside around our camp and wandered down to the camp at dusk to spend the night with us. Last night we had 10 hunker down with us.
Today, we are taking a day off and going to the big city. Wall, SD, that is. A motel, showers and laundry are on the top of the list, closely followed by a visit to Dairy Queen.
We have been camping in the Rover for almost a month, and are due for a ‘cleaning up’ and some ‘treats’! Since they are predicting severe storms in the area, perhaps it’s not a good night to be sleeping in a rooftop tent.
We found a great little place online, The Sunshine Inn. John, the owner, treated us like we were family. We highly recommend staying here if you ever find yourself in Wall, SD.
The Sunshine Inn in Wall, SD. Our home away from the tent for a few nights.John, the owner of the Sunshine Inn. Thanks John for everything!
First stop, after showers was the laundry mat.
We definitely smell better!
Quickly followed by our first trip to Dairy Queen, yes, I said first…we don’t have Dairy Queen at home, so this was a highly anticipated treat!
Yes, that crazy eyed DQ inhaler is Darrin! A very happy boy😁
All cleaned up and fortified, we ventured into the tourist world of Wall Drugstore, the main attraction in the town, and the other stores on the mini main street. We wandered through stores, buying absolutely nothing…really, where would we put it. We spent the majority of our time looking at all if the old pictures. There were walls and walls of them, very cool. And watching people.
The world famous Wall Drugstore.The little tourist area around Wall Drug. I love the grain silos at the end.
That evening the predicted storm arrived. We stayed out on the balcony as long as we could with some fellow travelers watching it advance across the plains. It was really cool to see it start so far away and slowly make its way towards us. We definitely don’t get that in the northeast. And then it poured! And the wind blew! And the rain went sideways. It was a very grand storm, definitely not a night to be sleeping in the rooftop tent!
The poor little Rover weathered the storm quite well, only a few minor leaks.
Another night of storms arrived, so we ended up staying 2 nights…quite a luxury!
The small towns in northern Nebraska, as we understand it, have town parks that allow travelers and transient farm workers a place to stay. They are often just a few sites, most with drinking water, some with power and bathrooms, others with pit toilets.
We checked a few out on our way across Nebraska and found a really nice one in Valentine. It was clean, had flush toilets and even a nice brook. All for a donation.
The people were friendly, and their dogs of course. We even met the town cop as he did his rounds.
While we stayed here there were 5 tenters, an RV, a teardrop trailer, a traveling motorcyle group in another 8 tents, and a girl scout troop on a road trip (1 of the leaders thought Darrin looked like a young Kenny Rogers – he has been singing The Gambler ever since).
A great way to spend a few very, and I mean 100 degrees very, hot days.
We also saw the coolest vehicle, besides our Rover, in Nebraska.
A Volkswagen kit made into a trike. Very cool!
On to the mountains of South Dakota , and fingers crossed, some cooler weather.
Well, we thought we had evaded the dreaded heat wave…but alas, it is not to be. I’m beginning to think we are bringing it with us. Every place we go, with the exception of the few cool days with the woodstove, we find out they are having a heat wave.
A melted northern girl trying to cool down.
Happily, we have found a small city park where we can camp cheaply near a nice cool stream. So, we are hanging here for a few days before we continue north into SD and hopefully, some cooler weather and a bison or two.
Happy Memorial Day.
A big thank you to all the Veterans for their service.
In today’s world, it is sometimes easy to loose faith in ones fellow man, woman, child, etc. And to be honest, I was starting to wonder if our idea of traveling so we could meet all kinds of different people was only a pipe dream. At campgrounds, we have met a few nice people, but the majority of people have been very stand-off’ish. We have been stared at, had our picture taken by people doing ‘drive-bys’ and sometimes totally ignored (Darrin, the optimist says they must not want to intrude).
Then we stumbled into, completely on a fluke, a small state park in northern Nebraska. We were making a quick exit, well as quick as our little Rover can go, from predicted storms in Iowa, tornadoes are not on our “must experience list”.
We looked at weather forecasts and the area we had thought to go in northern Iowa was under flood alerts, so Darrin suggested Nebraska, not a state we had intended to enter. I pulled out our 20 year old atlas and there in the very northwest corner was Ponca State Park.
We checked their weather forecast and it looked much better, so we packed our stuff and headed out. What a great decision!
We met the nicest people! Our campground host, the park staff and our fellow campers were all amazingly friendly and helpful.
Bob road his bike by every day to visit. We also met his wife Marlene who told great stories.Sherl and John, our campgound neighbors, shared their fire and stories with us. Thanks!They also shared their dog, Sophie. Hi Sophie!Steve an Kris shared their company and great knowledge of the area. Steve even went out of his way to find us a NE map. Thanks! And Cookie, their dog.And the best for last. The person who made Ponca SP a really welcoming place, Tony, our camp host. He helped us find a site, drove us around the campground and even took us downtown to the grocery store! Thanks Tony! We really enjoyed sharing a meal and Oreos with you. Hi to Asta…give her a scratch for us.
These are just a few of the many people we met during our 5 day stay. Many other people stopped by to visit. We enjoyed meeting each and everyone.
Remember how we said we wanted to get north out of the heat? Nebraska decided to help us out. 50s during the day and 40s at night, with a little rain, okay it poured, thrown in for good measure. No, this isn’t normal Nebraska weather…they ordered it just for us!
To show we are true northerners, and know just what to do in chilly weather, we fired-up the woodstove!
Only a northerner would travel with a wood stove attachment!Darrin tending the fire.And me slaving over the hot stove preparing dinner. Check out my pretty purple curtains!
Those of you who grew up camping in state parks, know what we mean when we say we did the “Sunday wood clean-up after all the weekenders left”, so the heat from the woodstove was 100% free.
