The Sanctuary

One of the coolest perks to working in the Hills for the summer is the VIP card. These magic little things get us into all sorts of tourist attractions for reduced prices (frequently 100% off) with the hope that we'll try a bunch of 'em out and then spread the word when people are looking for things to do.

Every year toward the end of the summer, the Stormers have a day-long outing where we make full use of this card. As it happens, yesterday was that outing.

(Ahem. Sorry guys. Here, let me even the score a bit.)

(Yikes.)

There were some of the usual stops involved -- Evans Plunge in Hot Springs, the Black Hills Playhouse in Custer State Park -- and they did not disappoint. But the new thing we did this year that was entirely new to me was the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary.

The sanctuary consists of about 13,000 acres and houses around 550 horses -- roughly 100 domesticated, the remaining being American and Spanish Mustangs. Tours take you across a small piece of those grounds (keeping in mind that 20 square miles is a lot to cover in a two-hour tour) where you encounter a few bands of these mustangs.

There are other interesting things to see, including a sundance site and the petroglyph cliffs ...

The cliffs have glyphs of varying age -- on the bottom, ancient Native American carvings. Above those, the carvings made by settlers passing through. (Over the top of some, graffiti from the last fifty years because people are dumb.)

Oh, and that was our guide, Walter. He's fairly young, not a native South Dakotan, but lives there full time and managed to answer every last question we threw at him. Including the somewhat embarrassing ones one of our leaders asked, like whether or not he danced.

Poor guy.

What may have been the coolest part of all, however, was when we happened upon a band of Spanish mustangs ... and they apparently wanted some attention. Even caught Walter a bit off guard.

Words cannot describe just how cool that was.

(This one's for my mother.)

(I played with that one a bit just because it was such a fun photo. And at this point I'm assuming Walter's used to ending up in tourists' pictures.)

When I managed to put my camera down for a couple minutes, a horse walked right up to me and nudged at my hand until I rubbed her nose. May have been my favorite moment of the day.