Badlands Ural: Getting There

 

Near the end of October, I figured I'd better introduce the Ural to Badlands National Park - before the snow flew.  Highway 44 and I-90 go pretty much straight there from our home in Rapid City, but where's the fun in that?  Lower Spring Creek road also heads that way (according to my map), and it's predominately gravel - and might have cool bridges!

  Sure enough, after a few miles, the pavement abruptly ended and the adventure began!

It wasn't long before I found a worthy photo stop.  As my regular readers know, it doesn't take all that much.

This lone structure deserves a zoomed-in shot.  Notice two of the panes in the little arched window above the main door are broken.  Wonder what happened there.  Baseball?  BB gun?  Probably just hail, but you never know.  Could be an interesting story.  I'm sure there are a lot of interesting stories out here on the Dakota plains.

And perhaps this will end up being one of them.  Sure couldn't ask for a better morning to head out!

I don't think I'd ever ridden through a remote unpaved region that was so well signed.  I had a good detailed map too, so keeping track of my progress was not a problem.

And what do you know?  Things were getting "interesting" already!  "HorSES on RoaD DAnger," the sign rather creepily read.  If the background were black and the letters were dripping red, I'd have been even more concerned.

But all I could see for miles were grass-covered hills, fence posts, and gravel.  And it was a nice three-wheeler road too!  Fairly smooth, but just loose enough to keep me on my toes.

I didn't have to wait long for the first pleasantly rustic bridge.  If my brother and I (and sister too, for that matter) had grown up here, we'd have had to put a rope swing or two in at least one of those trees!

Having that tree growing out of the bike's wind screen was not the best photo-framing job, but I had to include this shot for the sake of that perfect Ural shadow!

In around 30 miles, I was back on the blacktop at Highway 44.  Here I turned right (southeast) to head for the town of Scenic, South Dakota - maybe ten miles farther.

There isn't much left of it.  Though it's not all quite this abandoned.

The metal siding on this old store front is quite unique in my experience.  The lower sign over the door reads, "SECOND TIME AROUND."  Sure would have been impressive to see it the first time, I'll bet.

I probably could have spent a while here, just poking around, but the primary attraction that day was less than a handful of miles away.

Sheep Mountain Road is an unpaved dead-end spur off of 27.  It accesses a less visited section of Badlands National Park, lying to the southwest of the more popular tourist areas.  It's been on my list since coming through here on my Kawasaki over a dozen years ago.  It was time.