This is where I stopped.
JEFF'S EXCELLENT GALENA ADVENTURE, JULY 5, 2006
Today I had an appointment to have the bike tuned up at the 600 mile mark. So I got to Stugis about 9am (it's about 9 miles to Sturgis on the bad road). I then just had breakfast and walked through town. I was surprised how many log cabins there are in Sturgis. It seems like a quaint quiet town. I walked up to where I thought the Fort Meade museum was, but it was just the cemetery, so I sat there reading my camera manual. Boy, this stupid camera makes you go through all kinda hoops to get to 4 megapixels. Anyway, I figured that and the timer out finally.
I went to the library and looked at all the books that might contain Galena. There wasn't much information but I liked all the old time photos from the hills. It's amazing how huge some of the mine buildings were.
After I got my bike, I went up Vanocker Canyon and checked out some side roads. Off of the Galena road turnoff there's a nice road that goes south. I took that and wound up near a geodesic house on Simon Place, which connects to Boulder Creek Road, which connects to Boulder Canyon highway. So I took that to the Lost Gulch turnoff and took the Camp 5 road. I will hereby now declare that that is the worst road in the Black Hills. It started out nice, but kept getting worse and worse. Finally, it's the only place I dumped my bike, going into a dry creek bed. It's really neat back there, and there are all kinds of interesting rocks, but the road just turned into an anti-road and I parked. I walked up a bit farther but it just got worse. There are scrape marks on the rocks on the road where the bottoms of trucks have run into the rocks. Even down the creek bed the rocks have these scrape marks, so you can see that some people thought the plain creek bed was better than the road! But I saw a lot of oil drops on those rocks, so somebody paid the price.
This is where I stopped.
Coming back on Lost Gulch, I finally ran into some crazed ATVers who were zooming down the road toward me. I avoided one and he said "there's one more" as he went by, so I just parked off the side, and here comes this guy doing probably 30mph on that road. The lady passenger said "sorry" as they passed by. They both had a drink in their hands. As I was stopped thinking about checking out a side road at the top of the grade behind Geraldine's, a pretty good sized pickup passed me, headed down toward the grade. I took a side road, so didn't follow. Apparently he got down ok since I came down that way later.
I'm about to take a shower and go into Deadwood for some night life.