Trip Report: South Dakota Bikepacking Part I
Day One - Deadwood / Lead to Hill City / Orenville Camp on the Mickelson Trail
Deadwood, an old west gold rush town is famous for its connections to Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane, is the official terminus - Mile 109 - of the Mickelson Trail. You can see their gravestones and the saloon where ol' Bill was shot up in a poker match. Keep walking the hill over the cemeterery and you'll get to Sheriff Seth Bullock's grave, the man credited with finally bringing some order the lawless old west camp. Hike another short ways up the rutted, rocky trail and you'll get the top - White Rocks- a portruding, precariously stacked rock tower that you can scramble to the top of for a panoramic view of Deadwood and the surrounding hills. I do not recommmend climbing White Rocks in bike shoes, as I did.
The Mickelson was once the route of the Burlington Northern train, abandoned in 1983 and converted into a gravel and crushed limestone trail by 1998. As a rail to trail, it never gets steep, but may grind slowly up without saddle relief for hours at a time in parts. Logistically, north to south is easier as the trail loses 1150 ft overall.
Four miles down the trail from Deadwood (a bypass trail to Edgemont is available to reduce elevation) is the less touristy town of Lead. Apparently, it's pronounced "L-eeeee-d" and not "L-eh-d" - a "lead" being a mining term for the initial trace of gold found that leads to a larger deposit. Lead: A start, an initiation, a beginning. The start of the gold rush, the beginning of the conflict over the Black Hills, and our formal start to the trail (though I took several trips back and forth to Deadwood over the next few weeks for various reasons). In choosing a starting point - the Deadwood-Lead section of the trail is beautiful and runs past glittering rapids, wildflowers and old mining chutes - well worth the trek. On the other hand, I found Lead a much more tolerable town to base out of (working after the bike trip) than touristy, crowded Deadwood. There's even a great cafe hidden beneath the supermarket that sells lavender honey espresso milkshakes and tye dye tshirts. Do note, though, that the streets go uphill in all directions both to and from town, seemingly defiant to the laws of topography.
My riding partner for this trip was one Miggy Downs, who I met through 718 camping trips. One thing I love about 718 is the sheer amount of characters that end up on those bikepacking trips, most of whom are completely oblivious to their existance as the heroes of unwritten comic books. Tan and bearded, Miggy is famous for once cooking an entire raw rotisserie chicken on a bikepacking trip, and for being in some Instagram Hall of Fame for carrying insanely hilarious objects on his cargo bike. He's an obsessive gearhead, and was already driving my up a wall before our trip by sending me across Brooklyn and Manhattan to find the best gravel tires on his definitive list of the best gravel tires, of which no one was allowed to argue the merits of the definition "best" per his list. Miggy also hates route planning - the meticulous pouring over of maps, dragging of lines and points and diving into Google Earth that I do - so I figured it was a good pairing. I'd map and research the route and camping spots; he'd run the repair shop. He also owned a FAA approved bike case that fit two bikes.
In Lead, our plan seemed to come apart immediately when both of my tires, which Miggy was trying to set up tubeless, refused to stay inflated. This percipitated Lead-Deadwood-Lead trip number one, to get to the nearest bike pump with a gauge. In the end, we ended up putting by spare tubes in and crossing our fingers. Miggy stayed up late into the night, haunted by ubiquitous South Dakota black flies while troubelshooting his rack fit. I asked if I could help, knowing the answer was nil. Miggy asked me if I knew how to make a muscle tee.
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The gravel from Deadwood to Edgemont is baby fine and rideable with any tire, but can get looser from there as the trail heads south. From Lead, you'll quickly crest the steepest part of the trail at Sugarloaf Trailhead, to the top of a ridge with immediate views over the hills. On this section we rode with our new local friend, Arianne, who I met on the WTF Explorers forum while researching the trip. A local journalist, Arianne told us about recent police aggression against Native people - a mirror of the BLM and George Floyd protests across the country. Trump had just held a 4th of July rally in front of Mount Rushmore, a source of great pain to the local tribes stemming back hundreds of years.
After Red Cloud's War, the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 granted the Sioux Nation (A french misnomer, more forally the Oglala, Miniconjou, and Brulé bands of Lakota people, Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation) the unchallenged and unending ownership of the Black Hills, as well as a large amount of additional territory across the Great Plains. The Black Hills were a sacred to the Native American tribes that lived there. A huge, jaggedly spire dome of granite and metamorphic rock uplifted 3000-4000 ft above the surrounding plains, which stretch for hundreds of miles around it, it is obvious to anyone driving across the Dakotas why the hills would seem special. Tribes would follow Buffalo across the infinite swathes of hunting ground - the plains - and warriors would come to the hills to commune with gods and spirits.
In 1874-76, gold was discovered in the Black Hills and prospectors flooded into the area. The treaty was off the table. Like so many times before and after, the Native Americans were offered a draconian choice - sell the land or have it taken by force. They refused to sell. Thus began the Great Souix War that made legends and villians of Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Harney - names emblazoned all over the Black Hills. I'll try to do the history a little justice here, but I audio-booked "Buried my Heary at Wounded Knee" on this trip and cannot stop recommending it. You think you know the gist of what happened, but listening to chapter after brutal chapter was a different experience. Though the scope of history is large, it's not a dry read at all - the narrative is fable-like and leaves you invested in each generation of its real-life characters.
In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the US had indeed violated the 1868 treaty and illegally taken the land. Compensation was measured based on the value of the land and gold extracted, plus 100 years of interest. The tribes refused the hundred million dollar settlement. As with 100 years prior, there was no price for the Black Hills. 40 years later, the money still sit in an account compounding interests - about 1.5 billion today.
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Arriane left us here and we rode on, the trail now descending as canyon walls closed in. Farmland turned into high rock faces; a river rushed beside the trails for miles. We rode through dark tunnels and over wooden bridges. We saw a few other cyclists, mostly families or older couples on e-bikes, but for the most part, we were alone. At Mystic, the trail turned upwards - never too steep, but now a consistent and long grinding climb as it winded its way over the hills.
In American Serengeti, Dan Flores describes the tapestry of megafauna that blossomed across the Great Plains in the Pleistocene. Today, you can see there remains all over the Black Hills, including 61 mammoths in a climate controlled pit in Hot Springs, SD, just south of our route. Surrounding the igneous and metamorpic spires of the hills are rings of deeper time - first Paleozoic limestime and then Triassic shale, rich in dinosaur fossils. And rising above, on cliffs and boulders, the remnants of distant human civilizations are found in petroglyphs. In another layer of time, mining railroads built the track that we were on, boring deep holes and gouging this constant climbing grade into Granite and Schist, before they too fell away. The trailheads on the Mickelson - Mystic, Edgemont, Dumont - were once sawmills, lumber camps, and cattle shipping points. Today they are ghost towns, nothing but a historical marker and trailhead now that the train too has vanished, and someone laid gravel over that track and made it a trail. My nerves on masking tape edges, I grinded as fast as I could toward the last bike shop on our itinerary, watching the elevation lines tick forward and the minutes until closing time tick backward as we slogged upward into the hills. Finally, finally, we crested and descended into Hill City.
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The bike shop was on a shuttle run when we got there. There was a Post-It on the door with a phone number, but we only waited 15 minutes until the shuttle returned. I had been to this bike shop in 2016 on my first cross-country drive, and it had, in fact, been a bike shop. Whether through new ownership or due to Covid, it now operated more as a taxi service for the trail - there was no real mechanic working and, well, the mystery just deepened when Cass rented an e-bike from them the following week for her trip down the trail. Today, though, the shuttle driver let me go down to the basement and pick out my own tubes as she knew nothing about them. All of them were the wrong size - again, I am not sure if this was due to the shop transitioning away from any sort of repair services, or because of various COVID shortages. We'd been gone from New York for a whopping two days and somehow the world was suffering from both a change shortage and a tube shortage. I grabbed the last two available that were only slightly too small in width and Miggy rolled his eyes in approval. The masking tape was still holding up, though, so we kept it in.
With Sturgis only a couple of weeks away, Hill city was already overrun with tourists without masks and motorcycles galore. Miggy wandered off to gawk the Trump shop. We picked up camp fuel and groceries before heading 5 miles further south to Oreville Camp.
Back in NY, Miggy and I had had a recurring debate, one that we both somehow refused to google, regarding some law that he insisted existed where no campground can turn away a bike camper. "For safety reasons", he said, "no reservations needed". "That's crazy, I said, thinking about the extensive planning I'd had to do for permitting on backpacking trips which are equally dangerous, "no one gives a shit about my safety." It turns out we were both right. The law does in fact apply to state parks 7 states. South Dakota, where RV culture is king, is not one of them. Luckily, the nicest man from Wisconsin let us share his campsite, which had plenty of room. Jerry was retired and escaping the trappings of domesticated life for the summer, travelling around in his truck with his mountain bike and kayak for an indefinite period of time. He complimented Miggy's muscle tee and made me a gin and tonic.
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