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Monday, 6/14/21: Final Planning
I can’t believe that we are entering our last two weeks of our journey. My original planning, as loose as it was, sort of quit around Moab. We’ve been winging it since then. Sitting up here in the lush, for Utah, Uinta Mountains, with a good cell signal, I spent the whole day figuring out where to go next.
Prior to Memorial Day, finding camping spots wasn’t too difficult, especially in the BLM-rich dispersed camping haven of New Mexico and Utah. As we head home toward Wisconsin, things are looking more daunting.
It’s the weekends that present the biggest obstacle. The park where we are now set up, filled up completely over the weekend, but cleared out by Sunday evening, That is typical with campgrounds everywhere. Although there are a smattering of sites available during the week, weekends are booked solid for the rest of the summer.
I did manage to find a handful of first-come first-serve sites where you can nail down a campsite in the middle of the week, but you’d better dig in like a tick for the weekend. This is fine if you are in an area that provides a week’s worth of adventure.
After scouring through all my atlases of the states heading home, I came up with the Blacks Hills of South Dakota. There are a handful of National Forest campgrounds that set aside a small number of first-come first serve sites. But the most centrally located campgrounds are in the Custer State Park. All but one of Custer’s campgrounds are reserve-only and they are booked until the cows come home. The one exception is Center Lake Campground. It operates on the unique “same-day reservation” system.
The online reservations open up at 7 am each day. If you get online soon enough, you can snap up an open site. So, Plan A is to leave for South Dakota at 5 am. It is an 8 hour drive. At 7 am, on the way, stop and see if we can get a site at Center Lake Campground for the next 6 days. There is plenty to do in the Black Hills and the Bad Lands for a week, and this would cover us for the first weekend.
Plan B - if we can’t get a site at Center Lake, then we would find an overnight spot near Casper, Wyoming. I found a couple of candidates, like free camping at Douglas City Park. Then go on to one of the National Forest first-come first serve sites.
After the Black Hills, I have a vague idea on where to go. The following weekend, as we go through Minnesota may be a problem, however if nothing shakes, we can always just head straight home. But, Minnesota has a couple of nice bike trails that I want to explore. I hope we can work something out.
Well, gang, that’s it for today. Pretty boring stuff, I know.
Tuesday, 6/15/21: Pay Dirt
We left the campground at precisely 5:03 am. We are on mountain time and I wasn’t sure what time zone western South Dakota is operating on. At 6:30 am we had a good cell signal so we stopped on the highway shoulder and got on the Center Lake reservation website. There were 4 or 5 open sites and I quickly identified site #48 as the best candidate. Within a couple of minutes I had my reservation confirmation emailed to me. We are going with Plan A. Now we just have to get there. Eight long boring hours for a senior driver with a touch of ADHD is pure hell. Buck up, boy, let’s get ‘er done.
We’ve been to the mountainous region of Wyoming many years ago. It was sparsely populated and the mountains were rugged and rocky. Central Wyoming is more rolling hill grasslands. There isn’t a tree to be seen. The grass isn’t lush, but the landscape at least has a ground cover. Occasionally a tiny version of a Utah-like multicolored butte would emerge out of the ground. There are more oil wells than people. We bypassed Casper, the only actual city on our route, so we didn’t see very many souls.
The long tree-less and people-less vistas turned out to be more relaxing than boring as we sang along with our old “favorites” music playlist. We really got into Asleep At The Wheel’s “Bump Bounce Boogie” from the 1970s.
It was hot - 99º. One gas station attendant proclaimed that yesterday it was still winter and now this hits. When we crossed into South Dakota we were greeted by the verdant Black Hills. The temperatures plummeted all the way down to 93º, and stayed that way until 9 pm. A slow cooling down is predicted, however we will have one more day in the low 90s before we get relief.
Our campsite turned out to be perfect. Center Lake Campground is well laid out. There are three individual, well separated loops. The Black Forest woods are not thick, but they do provide some cover from the intense sun. Although each site is given a reasonable amount of elbow room, the level “pads” provided are very small. Our #48 had the largest parking “pad” in our loop. We also have the most elbow room.
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