Friday, July 8 – We hit the trails for hiking today! We drove over to Sylvan Lake to hike three trails in the area: The Sylvan Lake Shore Trail, Sunday Gulch Trail, and Harney Peak/Little Devil's Tower Trail. All in all,we hiked about 7 or 8 miles on trails rated Easy (2 miles), Moderate ( 3-4 miles), Strenuous (2 miles).
The Sunday Gulch Trail was the most unusual for us.
It was in a boulder field scattered along a stream descending into Sunday Gulch. The trail crosses a stream several times while passing over huge boulders.
Hikers use handrails fixed to the boulders to aid their decent.
Pretty slow going and actually easier climbing out then our decent into the gulch. It is a beautiful hike. We enjoyed the challenge for a couple miles.
The hike around Sylvan Lake was more a stroll but enjoyable.
This beautiful lake is nestled in the pine forest and is held back by a dam of huge boulders at its Northern end.
This is the wall of the dam.
Harney Peak/Little Devil's Tower Trail is rated strenuous, but we felt it was more in the moderate range.
The trail has been rerouted because of forest restoration after thinning to clear pine bore damage.
If you cannot read this easily, remember you can click on any photo to enlarge it.
Interestingly, Harney Peak is said to be the highest peak east of the Rockies. We did not finish this hike because it was getting late in the morning, and the trails were filling-up with families with kids.
We decided to turn around and hike to the peak some other morning.
We finished the day with a drive around the Custer State Park Wildlife Road.
We did see some Pronghorn, Bison, and wild donkeys.
Look who was holding up traffic.
He seems to be saying…Who you looking at?
The scenery was beautiful. Many meadows, pine trees and mountains.
We were a little disappointed in the wildlife viewing. The kids were loving the donkeys, but they seemed a little tame and staged to us.
We finished our day with a picnic lunch along a brook and headed home. A pretty nice day!
We did not go back to Mt. Rushmore last night for the night program. We had a huge thunderstorm with lighting. We have rescheduled this for Sunday evening.
SIDE NOTE: Many of you FMCA members have mentioned to us, either by email or comments on our blog, that you saw pictures of Paul in the most recent FMCA magazine, doing our residential refrigerator installation. Yep, that's him alright, but as you may have noticed, we did not write the article, but the author did use information directly from our blog posting.
Some months ago, Paul received an email requesting use of his installation pictures and directions for this type of refrigerator conversion and was promised he would receive credit by the author. We have not seen the article yet (We have not had our mail forwarded recently.) but understand no credit was given by the author. We did see the online article and did not see any notification of Paul's input. Interesting. Doubt we will do anything about the omission, but wanted readers to know....yes, that's Paul in the recent FMCA magazine and our installation story.
If you are interested in reading the post, you can find it here.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y'all soon. Have a great day.
