Roadtrip

Part 3: South Dakota, Black Hills

While continuing west, I noted that I was still slowly ascending -- about 2000 feet at this point, and probably one factor contributing to the increasingly dismal 55.6 MPG average I was showing.

It is astounding that people hay established fields and anywhere else that grass grows, even highway margins and medians, and create *thousands* of these big round bales and then just leave them sitting there. They're everywhere. Sometimes they're collected and stacked up, sometimes they're covered, but some have clearly been sitting out in the weather for a couple of years. The old smaller, human-liftable traditional hay bale seems to be gone, in favor of these half-ton lumps that get lifted with a "bale spear" attached to a front loader.

When I stopped out here, it was very quiet. Not even much in the way of cricket or grasshopper noises.

A fairly long stretch southward out of Wall eventually brought me to the Badlands park entrance, where the RV at the gate was taking *so* long to settle its finances or whatever that I had lots of time to get out and take pictures.

There's a gentle but visible elevation change up to here, as well.

Note the grey ball near the bottom of the fencepost ...

It's the top 3 feet or so of a ten-foot wall by the side of the road. But it looks almost the same as the big stuff, lending a very "fractal" feel to all of this.

I hadn't quite gotten to the point of just caving and using the A/C -- I wanted to keep in closer touch with this whole environment, which meant hearing it, smelling it, and feeling it. Windows open, less of that human isolation that closed cars so easily create.

I exited the park and onto 44, passing by the town of Interior which appears to be a few trailers and shacks scattered around -- not much to it. I headed west on 44, sort of doubling back to the south of the main Badlands area.

View the big picture to get my take on it...

At the airport there was a big "welcome bikers" sign out front. Sturgis is a few miles up the road, and I guess not everyone properly iron-butts their way in for the big bike rally. Such signs were all over town, in fact, and I started thinking that we need Hybridfest to grow to that sort of scale. I often explain Hybridfest to people as "like Sturgis for hybrid owners". But we can probably do without the Budweiser sponsorship.

The upward elevation trend had continued pretty steadily over the day and taken me to around 3500 or 4000 feet, and got my first tankful of *85* octane gas here. The pump didn't say anything about ethanol content, not that means much, but I figured that would be an interesting experiment to see if the 85 would give me more energy content and more MPG. Of course since the higher-altitude terrain was likely to be much more hilly and regularly outside the regen capacity, it could be a zero-sum tradeoff.

It was clear that gas was not nearly expensive enough around Rapid City, because the locals generally drove like it was still 39 cents a gallon, blasting up the hills full-bore like they had to prove something. Phew.

At 3900 feet, I noticed that my Thermarest air-mattress had become very, uh, turgid due to less air pressure outside it, and I had to let some air out before sleeping on it. As a sealed vessel, it was functioning as a primitive pressure-based altimeter.

For some reason the battery state of charge was also generally hanging lower than usual, down around 4 bars in the display instead of 6. Which makes *no* sense at all since the car actually has no barometric sensor, and thus no knowledge of altitude or ambient pressure, and there is no reason the hybrid controller would need to seek any other steady-state level than its usual 60%. I was't forcing the system to use any more battery than usual, even going up hills. Now, sometimes it was nice to have the additional overhead available for regen on the way down, but it's not like the car can possibly anticipate anything about upcoming terrain. [If Toyota's working on topo-GPS-based cruise control efficiency hacks, such a thing is certainly not in this car...] But something was definitely going on in terms of the car's overall operation.

The next morning I headed for the next major waypoint, the house of a friend-of-a-friend outside of Rapid City. He lives way up one of the narrow canyons around there, which made for an interestingly wiggly journey up a one-lane gravel/dirt road to find his place. This is one of those roads that hugs the side of a creek all the way up and jumps across a couple of times to find the flattest terrain on either side, and must have been a heck of a lot of work to carve into the side of the valley and build the bridges across.

He takes a somewhat fatalistic view of all this, saying "some of those could come down in the next 3 hours or the next 3000 years and there's no telling". But pieces of cliffs like this are probably more likely to break off during warm/cool seasonal transitions as water gets into little cracks and freezes and thaws. The neighbors have already had to bulldoze a couple of specimens off the road now and again.

When we got back to the house we threw *all* our hiking clothes into the laundry and encouraged the dog to jump in the creek and get sort of a bath because she'd been diving headfirst through all the nasty stuff and by that point was likely a walking urushiol bomb.

Anyone remember the Mazda ads back in the seventies? The piston engine goes boing, boing, boing, and the hybrid goes "Om...."

The set of carvings is actually quite a bit smaller than I expected it to be.

I eschewed the ten-dollar charge to park in the deck, found a place along the fairly complex exit road to stop and squeeze this off, and then fled.

Now I understand why the Rushmore area was chosen for the statuary. With all the crevices and wrinkles and rounded bits, the rocks around here are VERY suggestive of faces and heads and maybe a few other body parts, so it was a natural step for someone to get the idea of carving in a few more of them.

Again, probably plenty of tourist-trap stuff I could have stopped in to see and spend some more hours on, but I made this sort of a flying visit, pausing only to chat with another Priusful of people who pulled in and hand them a flyer.

I finally understand what Sturgis is really all about. It's not just about the camaraderie and hanging out with all the enthusiasts; it's also about the RIDES. Leisurely day loops of a hundred or two miles around the Black Hills can go through some great roads and surroundings and waypoints. Many of these folks were likely giving themselves a little more time to see the area before the big party kicked in, and from what I've seen bikers love the local tourist attractions. My first thought right after that was -- we need to add a similar piece to Hybridfest, and organize some group runs to local destinations which can combine with MPG driving clinics or just plain sightseeing. I suggested a tour of the Saft battery factory in Milwaukee, for example, if such a thing were offered.

My own little circuit through the area that morning was around 140 miles by the time I got to Sturgis, and even with the ups and downs I was starting to show some better MPG at 62.5. The local highways afforded some good mid-speed P&G and a few fun warp-neutral runs if I could crest a hill more slowly with nobody behind me first.