Leslie and David's Wanderings: 1 August 2024 Iron Mountain Loop

The heat has been oppressive the last few days with temperatures over 100F with afternoon thunderstorms which has limited our activities. We don’t like leaving Keira alone for more than a couple of hours in case the power goes out in the RV park due to the heavy demands from all the air conditioners and definitely not when thunderstorms are blowing through. But today seemed like a reasonable day to head out. We decided to drive a loop over Iron Mountain into Keystone, then over to Hill City and back through Custer. We picked up Iron Mountain road just inside Custer State Park. It is a paved narrow winding road up to the top of Iron Mountain with views of Mount Rushmore. There are three one lane tunnels we had to pass through that were only 10 feet wide while the Behemoth is a little over 8 feet wide. So a close squeeze. There were a lot of motorcycles on the road even though the Sturgis Rally doesn’t start for two days. Some of the tighter turns were a bit scary with the Behemoth taking up the whole lane and sticking out over the center lines with motorcycles zooming around the corners very close to or even over the centerline. There were a couple of close calls that we’re sure scared them as much as it did us. There were also two pigtails we had to drive through coming out of one lane tunnels that were fun to negotiate. We stopped at several over looks to enjoy the scenery and the views of Mount Rushmore. We dropped into the small town of Keystone where we ate lunch on the edge of downtown. The downtown area was a sea of motorcycles and riders. After lunch, we headed on over to Hill City where we stopped at Naughti Winery where we did a wine tasting and relaxed with a glass of wine. The dry red wines were surprisingly good, but all of their grapes come from the Columbia River Valley, none are from South Dakota. We drove through downtown Hill City and found the largest Smokey the Bear we had ever seen! From there we drove down to Custer and stopped at the Purple Pie Shop and each had a slice of delicious homemade pie for dinner (Leslie had Peach and David had Blueberry). As we were leaving Custer and heading back to Hermosa, we got lucky enough to see a beautiful doe and 2 twin fawns on the side of the road. The fawns were small and still had their spots!