Needles Highway to Custer State Park

We loaded up in Rick and Y's Jeep and headed up the Needles Highway. The shot below is called the Eye of the Needle; aptly named, don't you think?

Here is a shot of Rick and Y in front of the narrow tunnel that everyone drives through. We were more than happy to ride along with them as we are always concerned about scrapping the sides of the trucks' wheel wells as we would only have a margin of error of less than four inches. We have seen a Class C drive through the tunnel; I'm sure the driver was sweating bullets!

This is a shot of the area above the tunnel. Rick and John climbed up the rocks to get to the top. Crazy John was wearing flip flops. If you click on the picture, you might be able to see the two crazy ones in the middle of the picture. I apologize as we didn't have the long lens on the camera when I took the shot.

From one of the lookouts on the Needles Highway, we looked down on the valley where the town of Custer sits.

Here we are in what is called the Hole in the Wall. The cave doesn't go too far back as Rick checked it out. Last year when we visited the Black Hills, the cave still had some snow in the back; not so this year.

From the Needles Highway, we headed for the Custer State Park Wildlife Loop. As I've stated before, we never get tired of taking this drive.

We saw our first Pronghorn babies and even got to see a pair of twins. How cute!

We also saw our first American Goldfinch. We mistakenly thought the bird was a Western Tanager but after downloading the pictures (fuzzy), we could tell that it didn't have the red head and the wing markings weren't similar. Darn.

We just had to take a picture of this Bison bull as we were taken with not only his size but the size of his beard.

As we finished up the Wildlife Loop, we were all starving and stopped for lunch at Elk Canyon in Custer. We stopped at a store where Melissa found a clock she liked to see if it could be ordered; it could. We then stopped at the Black Hills Pies Company for a slice of pie that was very good.

After a full day, we headed home where I got some laundry done. We also had a busy evening talking on the phone to Bonnie, a friend of John's (George), and Melissa. Whew!