Our final day was short, just 45 miles, and almost entirely downhill. The weather was perfect, as it had been all week. I was already planning our return to St. Paul, wondering how far we could drive with our early arrival in Edgemont. I was also appreciating the classic Black Hills landscape around us: the forest of ponderosa pine with highlights of birch and aspen, the outcroppings of granite and shale (blue, gray, orange.)

The Lakota Sioux and others who lived here first considered the Black Hills to be sacred. In Black Elk Speaks (1932, the story of the Sioux holy man as told to John Neihardt) Black Elk tells of a dream in which he was on the highest mountain in the hills – formerly Harney Peak, but now called Black Elk Peak, about eight miles east of our trail:

“Round beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes of all things as they must live together like one being…and I saw that it was holy.”

It is easy to see how Black Elk would feel that way about this part of the country. It is also hard to forget that it was George Armstrong Custer (whose name is everywhere here) who led the 1874 prospecting mission that started the gold rush which displaced the Sioux, and who also led the 1876 U.S. Army in the Battle of Little Big Horn, the beginning of the end of free Indian life in the west as well as Custer’s last battle. The history of the Black Hills is part of the sad history of the American west.

There were a couple of things we saw on our last day that were notable, besides the beautiful land. Near the tiny town of Pringle, someone has assembled a huge pile of trashed bikes in a kind of sculpture. There was no artist’s statement, so we could only guess what the point of it was. Perhaps the impermanence of all things?

Later, we were blocked by a gate across the trail while some cowboys and cowgirls were wrangling cows, separating a few from the herd. The cows were reluctant to leave their friends (maybe they knew why they were being taken away.) We watched a really skilled young woman and her horse show the cow who was boss. We also had the sense that the ranchers were doing a little performance for the city slickers in their Lycra and on their fancy bikes. But it was authentic and pretty cool to watch.

We arrived in Edgemont around 2:00 and spent about an hour getting the bikes mounted back on the car, and changing into non biking clothes for our drive back east. I’d wanted to get to Chamberlain and cross the Missouri (which, in my mind, is the real boundary between the middle west and the true west.) We made it and had a good Mexican dinner while watching the sun set over the river.

It had been a lovely week in one of the best places you can get to from St. Paul in one day (by car!) Paul and Cindy are excellent travel companions and I can hardly think of a better way to kick off the summer.