While in South Dakota this year we visited a cave we missed last time. Jewel Cave is in the Black Hills, not far from Mt. Rushmore. We tried to see it last time we were here, but the tours were sold out for several hours and we didn’t have the time to wait.

This time we booked our tour a couple of days in advance so we wouldn’t have that problem. Good thing too; when we arrived the tours were full for several hours again. But, we got the one we wanted!

Jewel Cave, like so many other caves in the area, was discovered by accident in the late 1800s. At the time it was thought to be a small cave system, but in the past 30 years or so caving expeditions have discovered that it’s really one of the longest in the world. Over 190 miles of passages and rooms have been discovered and they aren’t done yet! The current caving expeditions have to crawl and wind their way through small passages for 15 hours to get to their base camp, then they spend a few days exploring, then they spend 15 hours crawling back out!

There is a ‘wild’ tour offered at this cave, but you have to be able to fit through a 24″ x 8.5″ opening so lots of people are not allowed on this tour. There’s a concrete ‘mockup’ of that size opening outside the visitor center, and while we were there we saw people trying to get through. Imagine how small that is!

We enjoyed our tour! It’s a bit colder in this cave than in others we’ve seen, at 49 degrees. Brrr! The steps and pathways are very nice, even stairs, flat paths, which is not like some other caves we’ve been in! We went up and down quite a bit, they say it’s over 700 stairs total (some up, some down). You start and end the tour in an elevator as the visitor center entrance is about 780 feet down. It’s not near the original and only natural entrance.

It’s named Jewel Cave because the men who discovered it were gold mining in the area, and on their first few trips into the cave they found formations that they thought were crystals which often grow near gold. Alas, what they thought were crystals were just calcite, formed from slowly dripping water leaving that mineral in the rock to collect.

Here are some pictures:

While in South Dakota, we travelled for a couple of hours back down into Nebraska to see the Toadstool Geologic Area.

This is a small area accessible by about 20 miles of dirt road, but at least the dirt road was fairly smooth and not potholed or washboard.

Once at the area, we found a small primitive campground and pit toilets. No visitor center, but they did have a few maps of the area and information boards.

The attraction is to take a mile-long loop trail up into the nearby hills to see the very strange and interesting formations that look like toadstools. We took the hike and were fascinated by the geology of the area!

We were able to take Laddy with us, and he enjoyed the hike as well, although for different reason! We saw a few rabbits and he smelled lots of them!

Here are some pictures:

While in the western South Dakota area, we drove through an area called the Badlands. Much of South Dakota is rolling hills and flat plains, and the area around the Badlands is that type. But, all of a sudden while driving along you start to see very spiky sharp hills, the kind that are called sawtooth ridges.

Right at the visitors center you can see beautiful spiky hills and can also observe the different colored layers that make up the geology of this area. Several million years ago this was the seabed of a large inland sea. The fossils found in this area are marine animals. Interspersed with the seabed layers are thick layers of ash from volcanos to the west, and also sandstone layers.

These layers were compressed into fairly hard layers and the wind and water from rivers and streams has been eroding the ground through the layers. Wind does a lot of the erosion and that causes the spiky sharp hill features.

The scenic road cuts through some of these hills, and then climbs to the ridgeline where you can look down into the ravines and hills. There’s one section of the area that has a very yellow large layer that’s not found in the rest of the area. I must admit I don’t know what caused the yellow color.

While driving along the ridge we came upon some longhorn sheep. They were right on the edge of the road, and weren’t bothered at all by people driving by. We got some good pictures of a male with huge horns and some smaller males, females and babies. Several were wearing radio collars so the herd could be tracked.

Here are some pictures: