Don't you mean Black "Mountains"?

I'm not sure who came up with the idea of calling these things simply "hills"... but even so, they are a welcomed sight. I see trees again! After being in the prairie for what seems like weeks (really just days), I have grown quite tired of the wind. It howls almost incessantly. And when you are on your bicycle, there is no escape. I ride, it blows against me. I stop and eat peanuts, it blows them out of my hand. I get the map out, it blows that too out of my hand. I crack open an oatmeal cream pie, it blows the wrapper away and sends me scurrying after. Sometimes, I just want to crawl in a hole or any other place of refuge for just a few minutes, but there's nothing... just prairie. Except once. I did find an old pit latrine in a city park and I definitely just sat inside one morning for about 45 minutes as a wind/rain storm blew through.

Anyways... I'm in the Hills, I should not dwell on prairie life. I'm staying in Rapid City with some cycling friends who were kind enough to offer me two nights of accommodation- one so I could try some excellent Mexican cuisine and the other to have my first buffalo steak. So today I embarked into the Hills on an unloaded bike (I left all my buckets of stuff in their garage) for a 75 mile loop. I had some pretty big climbs... I broke the 5280ft/1mile high level for my first time on a bike. My ears even popped on one accent.

And there they are. Mount Rushmore. Arriving the way I did from Florida made this a rather triumphant sight. What they don't tell you about the monument is that it's sitting at the top of a 2 mile, 10% grade hill which makes for a pretty killer climb. On the way down, my speedometer told me my maximum speed apparently got up to 57.4 mph. I question that, but it's always been accurate before. I kept my eyes on the road and my hands on the brakes for the most part, but I did glance down a few times and saw I was doing over 40 mph.

One of the accents up Iron Mountain was so steep, the engineers designed pigtails in the road and that's what you see here. The road is heading south, then loops upwards and completely in a circle, passing over the highway you were just on, and still heading south in the end. It was a pretty fun way to climb a mountain.

This one shows Rushmore in the distance.

Tomorrow I am heading back to play in the mountains some more.