The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
BLACK HILLS WILD HORSE SANCTUARY
Dayton Hyde used to say that wild horses couldn’t drag him away from his ranch in Oregon. Then in 1988 he saw hundreds penned in feedlots by the government in Nevada because there wasn’t grass on the range to sustain them. On his Black Hills spread (wild mustangs.com) they run free. Pop in for a tour, or book a couple of nights in a cabin. Drug (walldrug. com), still in family hands, draws up to 20,000 people a day with a pharmacy museum, a café seating 530 amid a gallery of Western art, a travellers’ chapel, a shop with
6,000 pairs of cowboy boots, and a life-size robotic T rex (“re-skinned last year,” Rick Hustead told me). his opponent to have won. Neither the images on the mountains nor the ones on the streets would be there but for a state historian of the Twenties, Doane Robinson. He felt South Dakota was short of traffic-stopping attractions, and told Borglum the answer might be a “heroic sculpture of unusual character”. Robinson, surely, can’t have got out much. Had he never walked in the Black Hills, where the pines, as Doris Day sang in the film Calamity Jane, “are so high that they kiss the sky above”? When I was in Custer State Park at the end of May, watching bison calves huddle close to mother, whole hillsides had been cleared of ponderosas and others were showing an unseasonal rust – the result of a fire last December that consumed 84 sq miles (217 sq km). Elsewhere, though, the pines were arrowing heavenwards. I got “cosy with those treetops” (as my pilot put it) on a brief helicopter trip with Black Hills Aerial Adventures.
And what about the Badlands? How could Robinson forget them, with their towering spires, plunging canyons and flat-topped tables from which the Lakota used to stampede the bison? There’s plenty to make you pull in there – though I’d recommend a stay of a night or two. This otherworldly landscape – which 65 million years ago was an inland sea – is at its best early and late, with a low sun revealing its layers and colours.
With Keegan Carda of the state tourist board, I spent a couple of days in the Badlands. Some of the time we hit the road with rangers: first with Tyson Nehring in the north, then with Vince Littlewhiteman in the south, which since 1976 has been run in an uneasy partnership between the National Park Service and the Oglala Lakota Nation – the eighth-largest American Indian reservation in the country. The park covers 380 sq miles (984 sq km). Rangers are expected to serve also as police officers, firefighters and paramedics, and to answer questions from tourists who reckon some of the “bison” don’t look like the ones in the brochure.
The two men’s patches are vastly different. The north has Tarmac roads, viewpoints, a lodge and campground. The south is unsigned 4x4 country, where visitors need to have about them both maps and wits: much land is leased to ranchers, the “gumbo” clay turns treacherous when wet, and you might come across UXOs – unexploded ordnance. During the Second World War, residents were given a week to get out so the US Air Force could use the reservation for target practice.
The bighorn sheep, less used to tourists, are wilder in the south,
Vince reckons. So, too, are some of the fossil-hunters. Several times at night he has found armed men intent on a dig. When he’s outnumbered six to one, he adds: “All I can do is wave to them and say, ‘I’ll catch you another day.’”
Both rangers mentioned sights on their patch that weren’t what they used to be. Nothing they could do about it: the Badlands is one of the world’s most rapidly dissolving landscapes. The whole place is falling apart, being borne away by the wind and the rain and the White, Bad and Cheyenne rivers. If I were you, I’d go and see it as soon as you can.