Devils Tower & Deadwood

We'd driven past a lot of ranches the day before and again that morning — Wyoming is mostly ranches the way New England is mostly trees — but the run-up to Devils Tower had something new in it. A few miles out from the monument we passed our first bison of the trip: a small herd in a fenced range alongside the road. Farmed, almost certainly, given the ranching neighborhood — but bison are bison, and the kids hadn't seen any in person before. Edrik called them out before I'd spotted them.

The Tower itself reveals itself slowly. You see it first from miles out as a vertical smudge on the horizon, then it gets bigger and more weirdly geometric until suddenly you're at the base of it. It looks engineered. It looks like someone set it down. The Tower Trail loop around the base is just over three miles — Apple Health logged us at 1.9 hours, slow because we kept stopping to look up. The landscape changed underfoot too: red rocks, exposed mountainside, evergreen and scrub. The morning got warm. The kids stayed game. It was the kind of national-monument day that justifies the early start and the months of planning that put it on the map.

After the Tower, Jacqui took the wheel and we headed for lunch. I'd researched a route the night before that would let us see a couple of things on the way to Rapid City and end at a restaurant in Spearfish where Sierra and Jacqui could find gluten-free options. It wasn't a bad plan. The problem was we ended up on the extra-long version of it — an extra hour and a half in the car after a morning that had already used up the family's scenic-byway energy. Spearfish Canyon is genuinely beautiful (granite cliffs, waterfalls, spring evergreen, the kind of byway that earns its 'scenic' label), but at that hour, with everyone restless and getting hungry, the canyon was getting wasted on the wrong audience.

We pulled over at a waterfall to stretch. That helped. By the time we got to Redwater Kitchen in Spearfish around 2:30, the mood had reset. Sierra ate gluten-free mac and cheese. Jacqui took the photo of me and the kids at the booth. Once we'd refueled — the food does most of the work on a day like this — the rest of the afternoon got easier.

Deadwood was a short visit, but it was the right kind of short. We walked the main street, took in the Old West preservation work, and Jacqui and Edrik got ice cream at one of the storefronts. Sierra and I were still full from lunch, so I made her a promise: ice cream when we got to the Airbnb.

We rolled into Rapid City and Mary Jo's Place — our home base for the next three nights — in the late afternoon. I hadn't told the kids one detail of the place: it had an indoor pool. They walked in, did the quick house-tour with me, and the moment they saw the pool, the whole day's earlier restlessness vaporized in about thirty seconds. There's something about giving kids a small surprise after a hard day in the car that overcorrects every minor frustration of the previous six hours.

While Edrik headed for the pool, Sierra and Jacqui made a quick grocery-store run to lay in food for the next three nights — and Sierra came back with ice cream. Promise kept. The day ended better than its middle had threatened.

Tomorrow: Mt Rushmore in the morning and the Black Hills the rest of the day.