Here are the pictures from my final day in South Dakota and our venture into Wyoming. We took interstate 90 straight out of Rapid City and headed west. We ventured through Sturgis, Deadwood, Spearfish, Belle Fourche, the geographic center of the United States, Devils Tower and Gillette, Wyoming.
This was a great way to end our vacation as Devils Tower left me awed. The smaller cities that we drove through were fun and interesting. Deadwood and Spearfish are cities important to the early days of the gold rush that took place in this area in the late 1800's. Gillette was the last city that we passed through and we could have probably left it off the agenda but we had the time to go and I would have spent the rest of my life going "I wonder what was in Gillette". That mystery was solved with the answer of "not much, really".
We did see an enormous coal mine (for lack of a better word). It isn't the same type of mining I'm used to from my years in West Virginia as the ground looks as though it is simply scraped open to reveal the seam and the coal is put into huge dump trucks then put on a conveyor belt and loaded onto a train. The seam of coal is miles long and could be 50ft or more deep. The operation is enormous and really left me understanding the coal availability in the western US much better. The daggone stuff could be tilled up with a good rototiller almost.
The vacation overall was fantastic and I hope that you guys enjoy all the pictures that I was able to get up on line. Again, many of the pictures are captioned, those that aren't I think are either self explanatory or repetitive and shouldn't need much explanation.
Enjoy!
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