Driver Tony took us past the Thunder Basin National Grassland to get to the Black Hills where we will stay in various campsites in Custer State Park in South Dakota. We drove by an open, surface coal mine, the Black Thunder Coal Mine, which is a HUGE hole in the ground that they started back in the 70s. Today is Sunday, and the plant was busy loading up rail cars and ginormous dump trucks and other male-fantasy-toys crawling all over it. With a little research, I found that this coal comes out of the ground ready to be crushed and used as is for power plants. It certainly isn’t a dying industry yet. The pictures below were from their website. Right now the ground is really green from spring moisture. I was too busy gawking to grab my phone for pictures.

Our first Custer State Park campsite is at Grace Coolidge which is right off the main road next to a creek where you can see the brown trout, or brook trout (was the tail spotted?) swimming against the current. It looks like you could reach right out and grab one, bear style, but it quickly swam away when I held out my phone for a picture. And speaking of phones, there is no Verizon service here, so I will have to limit my access to when we have Dishy up on the van.