In the Vortex realm, we operated on Wednesday May 26th where we spent the night in Loveland, Colorado. The next day was a travel day and we were instructed to move to our next location with a potential target area. The place for the hotel that evening was Spearfish, South Dakota. In order to get there it would take about 6 hours with us traveling from Colorado through Wyoming to Spearfish. By the way, Loveland is Northeast Colorado and Spearfish is in Northwest South Dakota. On the way to Spearfish, we got the chance to drive through the Black Hills National Forest. The next paragraph gives you some knowledge about the Black Hills. I took this directly from wikipedia, the link will be at the bottom of the page for your on viewing purposes. All in all you can probably skim through these next couple of paragraphs. I just put it there for the sake of having some explanation.
Black Hills National Forest is located in southwestern South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. The forest has an area of over 1.25 million acres (5,066 km²) and is managed by the Forest Service. (Directly from wikipedia).
The Black Hills (Pahá Sápa in Lakota, Moˀȯhta-voˀhonáaeva in Cheyenne) are a small, isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains of North America in western South Dakota and extending into Wyoming, USA.[1] Set off from the main body of the Rocky Mountains, the region is something of a geological anomaly—accurately described as an "island of trees in a sea of grass". The Black Hills encompass the Black Hills National Forest and are home to the tallest peaks of continental North America east of the Rockies.
The name "Black Hills" is a translation of the Lakota Pahá Sápa. The hills were so-called because of their dark appearance from a distance, as they were covered in trees.[2]
Native Americans have a long history in the Black Hills. After conquering the Cheyenne in 1776, the Lakota took over the territory of the Black Hills, which became central to their culture. When European Americans discovered gold there in 1874, as a result of George Armstrong Custer's Black Hills Expedition, erstwhile miners swept into the area in a gold rush; the US government re-assigned the Lakota, against their wishes, to other reservations in western South Dakota. Unlike the rest of the Dakotas, the Black Hills were settled by European Americans primarily from population centers to the west and south of the region, as miners flocked there from earlier gold boom locations in Colorado and Montana.
Today, the combined population of the nearby reservations and Ellsworth Air Force Base create a unique diversity different from that of the rest of Wyoming or South Dakota. As the economy of the Black Hills has shifted from natural resources (mining and timber), the hospitality and tourism industry has grown to take its place. The major tourist spots include Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, Crazy Horse Memorial, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Anyway, that's enough for the historical background. At first I tried figuring out why they called them the Black Hills but I gave up. I wanted it to be something ridiculous like the trees were actually black, major crimes back in the days happened, ghost towns, or something to that effect, a hollywood type of feel. But from reading some stuff none of that seemed plausible but it still could be true. Look into it. Anyway here are some photos. I think they are pretty cool. I didn't know there was so much in South Dakota as in my next blog I will tell yall about another place with a "Bad" name that only makes you think of something exciting and dark happening there. Enjoy the photos, be easy.
Graylen
PHOTOS:
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills_National_Foresthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills
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