Day 4: Worland Campground - We Put the Shady in "Shady Tent Sites!"

We slept in a little later than planned, but broke camp and headed out earlier than we had so far on the trip. Even though the camp site was pretty primitive it was nice to be camping in the park forest instead of a commercial campground. We continued our way East through Custer State Park and ended up spending around an hour touring around some of the winding roads that ran through the park. We saw a bit of wildlife including a couple of herds of buffalo before we headed out of the park.


Exiting the park we took the Iron Mountain Road which runs from the East side of the park up to the Mount Rushmore National Monument. This road was great to ride on the motorcycles. These were the twistiest roads we'd been on and forced us to keep our eyes on the road with the constant tight turns and the one-lane tunnels with blind corners at the exits. The only drawback was getting stuck behind slow-moving cagers. Although we didn't get any photos along the way, Paul took another time-lapse video that we'll try to post at some point.

We made it to the Mount Rushmore National Monument and spent a little over an hour there taking photos and walking around the loop in front of the sculpture.



We left Mount Rushmore and headed up to Sturgis, home of the famous Bike Week. Even at this time of year we saw tons of motorcycle riders, probably more bikes than cars.


Next we left South Dakota and headed back into Wyoming to Devil's Tower which was pretty cool. We didn't have time to walk around the whole monument, but we walked up as close as we could and took a few photos. Apparently you can climb it (I wonder if you can do that on any other National Monument?) and we saw several climbers almost half-way up the formation. We also got to test our National Park Pass that we had bought at the Rocky Mountain National Park. For $80 the pass covers the entrance fee to all National Parks, Monuments, and Forests for one automobile for a year. The best thing is that instead of a car, it can cover *two* motorcycles, so this worked out perfect for us.




The rest of the day we spent driving West through Wyoming until after 11pm again. So far we've yet to make it to our camp site before dark. Our daily schedule calls for around 8 hours of driving plus around 3 hour for stops (gas, lunch, scenic pullouts, etc), but I think our stops are adding up to well over 5 hours a day and we're starting at least an hour late, meaning we have to keep driving several hours later into the night to hit our trip waypoints. We've made camp at a small campground/RV park in Worland, WY (still 100mi short for the day). Tomorrow we'll continue to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. We're supposed to get there in the afternoon so we should finally be able to make camp in the daylight, and spend some time touring the park.