The Black Hills, Carhenge, and the prairie: OFMC heads home

Randy on his 1800 VTX at Car Henge, north of Alliance, NE

Jason needed to be back in Denver around 3 p.m., so he was up and gone from Deadwood by 6 a.m. Four more of the OFMC headed out at 9 a.m., leaving five of us. We took our time and enjoyed the fabulous roads that the Black Hills offer.

From Deadwood we made our way to Keystone, which is the little town just down the road from Mount Rushmore. Here we had to choose between two of the best roads anywhere: the Needles Highway or Iron Mountain Road. We should be cursed with such choices every day. We chose Iron Mountain Road.

Both these roads feature a Black Hills innovation, called the "pig-tail bridge." These bridges were an engineering answer to the question of how to go up and down steep slopes without making the road so steep as to be dangerous. What they did was to build a bridge followed by a 270-degree turn, which brings you right around and under the bridge you just passed over. Iron Mountain Road has three of these.

Both roads also have tunnels where there was no other option. They didn't just blast tunnels any which way, however. In most cases, looking through the tunnel from one end or the other, Mount Rushmore is perfectly framed in the distance. There was some real thought that went into designing these roads.

Iron Mountain Road comes south into Custer State Park and we continued south along SD 87 through the park and on into Wind Cave National Park, where we connected with U.S. 385. Along the way you will commonly see buffalo (see the slideshow below) and there is one more pig-tail bridge as well as a beautiful old high bridge across an equally beautiful gorge.

Past Hot Springs we came down out of the Black Hills onto the prairie, and continue south into Nebraska. While the area around Chadron is like an iceberg of hills broken off from the Black Hills ice floe, in general this is not an area where you'll see many trees. Not that it doesn't have its own kind of beauty, but it's not the kind of bold, in-your-face spectacular beauty that the Black Hills offer.

North of Alliance, NE, we went out of our way to visit Carhenge, one of those oddities that make traveling fun. This is a place where some local farmers, for fun, took old cars and built a detailed replica of Stonehenge, right down to the alignment with the sun at the solstice. Bill and John and I had stumbled on this place by chance years ago when we pulled over into some shade and noticed something strange through the wind break. Coming out on the other side we were astounded.

The wind break is gone now, with just a few big old trees remaining, and Carhenge is clearly visible from the road. It has become a bit commercialized, with a gift shop on the site, and they've added some new, questionable features that have nothing to do with Stonehenge. It's still well worth the stop.

Spending the night in Alliance, we chanced to be there for Heritage Days, their big annual event, and the place was jumping. We were most struck, however, by the number of young girls pushing baby carriages. We speculated that in a town like this you either leave for college and never come back or you get married right out of high school.

Finally the next day, we headed home. South across Nebraska prairie, into Colorado at Peetz, where we passed hundreds of wind turbines generating megawatts of electricity, and then across the eastern Colorado prairie. Rather than jump on the interstate at Sterling and blast home, we turned straight west, toward Greeley, along CO 14, which runs south of Pawnee National Grasslands. The Pawnee Buttes are those that James Michener called Rattlesnake Buttes in his novel, Centennial, and while they were only just visible to our north, we could see them. We could also see more wind turbines to the east and west of the buttes, a new addition to the landscape since James Michener last came out this way.

At Greeley we turned south on U.S. 85 and broke into ones and twos at our respective routes in the Denver metro area. This ride was over.

Related articles:
OFMC into the inferno
Motorcycle touring with the guys: Introducing old sights to new eyes
OFMC ride: More hot riding and finally coolness and green
OFMC sees green in Idaho and Montana
LIttle Big Horn and into the Black Hills; the OFMC rolls on
The Black Hills, Carhenge, and the prairie: OFMC heads home