48.3 miles cycling, 2664′ of climbing (2067.2 tot) – to read from the beginning, click here.
We got up early and headed back down the hill to the Deadwood Miner’s Hotel restaurant for coffee and breakfast. They were quite short staffed but we sat at the bar and had a cheery if very busy waiter/host/busboy/. We got our caffeine fix and also a filling omelet and of course, full water bottles.
The Mickelson Trail is a 109 mile trail from Deadwood to Edgemont SD. We are going to ride about 60 miles to the Crazy Horse Memorial, but today’s task was to get to Hill City.
The trail from Deadwood heads up almost immediately and continues up for over 17 miles before you get a break. It is a rail trail, so it’s *mostly* under 3% grade, though the route I took had a couple of much steeper sections. I had planned the route to be the shortest distance, but Dana, not having the routing app, was ahead of me as she normally is and took the longer route while I was on the shorter. It took quite a bit of figuring to determine where she was relative to me and eventually we got back on track and headed to Hill City, up that 17 miles and then down, down, down.
Our first choice for the overnight was the High Country Guest Ranch and we stopped there to check it out. We quickly realized it was a place to sleep, but didn’t have any restaurant and it was four miles into town and four miles back. The folks at the HCGR were amazingly helpful at finding us a place to stay closer to town and we kept on the trail into Hill City proper and planted ourselves at the Black Hills Trailside Park Resort. We set up, and I went grocery shopping for dinner — a simple salad mix with faux crab for protein.
A couple who was RV in the camp asked Dana about our trip and invited us to their setup to have a glass of wine, some wood-fired pizza, and to hear about our travels. They own KT BBQ in Boulder CO and brought along a pizza oven. Had a nice wrap up to the evening and climbed into our bags for another chilly sleep.
Tomorrow we’re headed to Rapid City via Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore!
