Weather: sunny in morning, overcast later. Evening thunderstorms
119 miles
I arose late, around 8.30. After breakfast and packing, I went for a short walk up the road to the town's post office to get some more stamps, only to find that it did not open on Saturdays. I returned to the motel and drove the short distance to the nearby Mammoth Site which I had seen widely advertised around the town.
In 1974, building work on the site led to the the discovery of mammoth bones. Excavation work soon revealed the site to be very rich in mammoth bones. Its origins lie in a sinkhole around 12,000 years ago, into which mammoths fell and found themselves unable to escape. Gradually the hole filled in while the surround land was eroded, until twentieth century construction work uncovered bones close to the surface.
Strangely, all of the fifty-plus mammoths found on the site were males. The current theory is that mammoths followed a similar lifestyle to modern elephants, with females remaining in the herd but young males going off to wander on their own. In this way, the elder members of the herd might know the hole to be a dangerous place and herd members thus avoid it, but lone males would lack the experience and be more likely to fall in.
While three of the mammoths found on the site are woolly mammoths (similar in size to modern African elephants), the majority are the larger Columbian species which, lacking the thick coat, even more closely resembled elephants. However they were more closely related to the woolly mammoths and the pygmy mammoths which evolved on many islands, gradually shrinking in size, some no more than four feet (1.2m) high. The last of these pygmy mammoths died out a mere four thousand years ago on remote islands in northern Siberia, several thousand years later than their larger relatives went extinct.
The visit began with a guided tour of the excavations, protected by a large wooden building. Many of the bones (not fossils) had been left in place as they were found, several metres below the original ground level. Following the guided portion of the tour, we were left to wander around the site at leisure and to look at museum exhibits in a room next door.
I left around 12.00 and headed back into the town to get some fuel and lunch, having the latter at another Subway restaurant. I then headed through the town and into Wind Cave National Park again before taking a road out west towards Jewel Cave National Monument. Here I stopped at the visitor centre, booked a place on the next tour and spent the time before it commenced watching a video about the cave.
The cave is very different to Wind Cave, with only small amounts of boxwork but a huge variety of other cave formations in a wide variety of colours, hence the name. The cave system is even longer than Wind Cave, with 129 miles known at the time I visited, making it second only to Kentucky's Mammoth Cave in the USA, and the third longest known system in the world.
The cave was discovered around 1900, like Wind Cave by the breeze blowing through the narrow natural entrance on the side of Hell Canyon. The entrance was too narrow for the discoverers to crawl through, forcing them to enlarge it with the aid of dynamite. On making their way inside, they found walls covered in sparkling crystals, to their initial disappointment of no mineral value, but they soon realised the tourism potential.
By 1959 only a mile and half of cave was known, until rock-climbers Herb and Jan Conn were invited to help explore further. Having previously preferred rocks above ground, they were quickly hooked, and soon discovered the cave to be far larger than previously imagined. Exploration enabled new tour routes to be opened, while dedicated cavers continued to find new passages and vast new caverns. The guide explained that one of the largest, known as the ``Big Duh'' for want of a better name, is so remote that a round trip there takes four days, including a half mile passageway just large enough to crawl along on one's stomach -- barely a dozen people have ever visited it.
The tour was thankfully rather easier, with pathways and staircases built where necessary, allowing visitor access to the cave while preserving its natural splendours. There was plenty to see, from long pencil-thin stalactites and columns through popcorn-like formations on the walls to bizarre draperies, some resembling giant bacon rashers.
I left the cave around 4.30 and continued west, crossing into Wyoming towards a town named Newcastle. There I turned to the north up towards the Devil's Tower, in the northwest corner of the Black Hills. I crossed the I-90 freeway at the town of Sundance (that of Kid fame) and decided to stop there for the night, it being the nearest town to the tower. I chose to stay at the Arrowhead motel on the town's main street, and after a rest went out in search of dinner.
My guidebook suggested a place just across the road -- I later learned that Bill Bryson had been distinctly unimpressed with it during a stay at the motel next door to mine. It proved to have some large party in and a long wait for food, so I returned to my room, checked the guide again and got in the car to drive a couple of miles down the road to the Log Cabin Café. There I had a simple but acceptable meal of salad followed by veal cutlets, after which I returned to the motel. I retired for the night around 11.00.