I was more interested in the parts of Wind Cave National Park that are above ground than I was in the cave. I asked a ranger in the visitor center and was directed off the normal, more-crowded tour road onto a couple of dirt roads into the interior of the park where animals are more-frequently seen and visitors are scarce.
We’d barely left the visitor center parking lot when I saw a Coyote trotting across a field. I stopped to look at it, and it stopped to look back at me. We looked at each other for a few minutes, then I drove on.
There were prairie dogs pretty much everywhere we went.
Mule Deer near park headquarters.
The Bison are kept within the park boundaries and managed. The herd is culled every fall during a round-up that attracts tourists from all over. The numbers in the park are kept at around 1,600. This bull was relaxing about 20 feet off the road.
Once we got onto the dirt roads, there was very little traffic and wide-open views.
Every so often, the amazing views would be enhanced by a herd of Bison or a Pronghorn or Mule Deer. The ranger told me that only the Bison are managed. The Pronghorn and deer can jump the fence. There are elk in the park that can’t jump the fence, but they’ve designed fences that can be lowered to let the elk out and then raised to keep them out so the numbers in the park don’t get too large. We didn’t see any elk.
Note the Bison herd in the gully. They give some clue to the scope of the landscape.
A beautiful, lone Pronghorn walked across the road in front of the car, giving us great looks.
But when I took out the chair, it took off. I scrambled and got this lovely shot.
The road dumped us out in the middle of the wildlife loop in Custer State Park, so we drove back to our lodge on that route.