Sturgis, Deadwood, Lead

 Thursday - May 20, 2021

We headed east over to Sturgis this morning.  It is only 17 miles from Spearfish, on I-90.  This is also a lilac-friendly town.  It was very clean, most stores were open, but not all of them, and some of the bars were not open for the season yet.

We passed the motorcycle museum as we came into town, so that was our first stop. This was a nice museum, 110 motorcycles I think she said.  Here are a few.

One motorcycle of particular interest to Joe was this Sears bike.  His high school friend, Ed Williams, bought one of these back in the day.  He sent a picture to Ed today and resurrected some good memories.

More bikes.

He thought this "Smokin Joe's" was pretty cool.

Here is a picture of downtown Sturgis.  It's hard to imagine this town filled with bikes and people.

Across from the motorcycle museum we found some car art for our next door neighbor, Paul.  He really likes rusty things.  His wife, Sam, though, not so much.  He may have to do some bartering to get this.

From here, we took a road out to Bear Butte State Park.  At the turn-off, was this "CHIP" buffalo, but we don't know what it represents.

This is rolling grassland out here, but the Butte stands tall, over a pretty lake.

There was a row of birdhouses back here, on both sides of our road.  We don't know what kind of birds they were for, but we did see some pretty birds along this road.  We haven't found a bird book yet to check them out.

When we came back to the lake (it was very windy), there was one guy kiteboarding on the lake.  Another person (we think it was a girl) was getting one ready, but it was a little different.  It set up above the water about 12-18 inches.  We don't know if that was called something else, but she got up and going across the lake.

He got some air here.  

That was an interesting little drive.  As we came back into Sturgis from the mountain, we got a shot of the town again.

We parked on the streets, found some lunch at Uncle Louie's, then walked the shops a little.  Then we headed out to Deadwood, again on 14A, which is 13 miles.  We drove down to the rodeo grounds first, and saw this prospector's statue.

Deadwood is a narrow town, very hilly.  It is a casino town, so there were lots of people on the sidewalks.  But parking is a problem.  We drove around and around, but never did find a parking spot, except the public parking which cost $7.00, and one lot at the very end of town.  They have a trolley, so I guess that's how they move people.  I wanted to walk into one of the "old" casinos, but we will have to go back to do that.   Now that we know the town, we will have a plan next time.

We continued on 14A through Central City, (1 mile) to Lead (3 miles). Central City was a smaller town, so we just drove on through.   Lead is another narrow town in the hills.  We drove around and around, just checking it out, and ended up, to our surprise, back in Deadwood.  The only Lead sign we found was at the high school, but there was a mine in town, we don't know what kind or whether it is still working.

So we drove back through Deadwood, Central City, and Lead, and continued on our way.  We stopped at a convenience store the second time through Lead, and Joe said, "Damn, we've gone 72 miles on a 17-mile road trip."  That's how we roll.

 Our next side trip was up to a ski lodge, Terry Peak, which still had snow on some of the mountainsides.  The elevation here was 6,486.  We didn't drive up to the Barefoot Resort, though.

We finally got back to the scenic byway part of 14A that we were on yesterday.  Somewhere on this road we came across a bust of Abraham Lincoln.  We don't know why it is in this place.

Just as we hit the edge of town, Joe spotted a yard sale, and without thinking, asked if I wanted to stop.  (He had second thoughts almost immediately).  They had a lot of tools, some of which Joe considered but decided against since we would have to haul them around all summer in the RV.  But he had suggested earlier I might take the "loppers" to get my lilac bouquets, and they had a set!  I didn't buy them, but I thought about it.

We weren't on a hunt for wildlife today, but we did see a little:  a few deer (8-10), some prairie dogs (2 of them tried to race us in the car), a few antelope, and a marmot.  We got home about 4:30, having driven 110 miles.  Rain had been predicted about 2:00, but the forecast kept changing, and we finally got a little thunderstorm about 7:00 p.m.  Another fun day in the books!