Second in line at 7:05
The visitor center at Wind Cave opens at eight. Erika and I were on the concrete outside it at 7:05 with Big and Little, second in line. Fifty-five minutes in front of a locked door, watching the light come up over the grass.
The couple ahead of us had done this the hard way already. They walked up at nine the previous morning and every ticket for every tour was gone. About half of the day’s tickets go on sale at that counter, first-come, and the rest are booked online days ahead. They were leaving the Black Hills that afternoon.
We had not planned to be there either. We finished our stretch in Custer looking at what came next, and I pulled up a map and found that Wind Cave was a thirty-minute drive from the house we had been sitting in the whole time. Elk Mountain Campground is the only campground in the park, and it had sites open a few days out, in September. We booked two nights. We did not book tours, which is how we ended up on the concrete.
The wrong direction first
The day before, we drove away from the park, out toward Rushmore, and spent five hours at Reptile Gardens. They advertise the largest reptile collection in the world. We did not check.
Big put his hand flat on a python during the snake show and left it there longer than the handler expected. Later he stood at the rattlesnake glass close enough to leave a mark on it and did not say anything for a while. Little went back to the prairie dog enclosure three separate times and then spent most of an hour at the insect cases in the Sky Dome, moving down the row and back up it.
The bird show had a vulture, a merlin, and a barn owl. The vulture worked. The merlin worked. The barn owl came out, would not hold still on the perch, turned its back on two hundred people, and the two hundred people made a sound about it anyway.
We turned into the park that evening. Bison on both sides of the road. Prairie dog towns with one animal up on its back legs at the mouth of each burrow. Two small bands of pronghorn, maybe six animals each, working the same slope a quarter mile apart. A bison was standing against the campground sign when we pulled in. A ranger told me later that night where they had come from. The bison here descend from fourteen animals the American Bison Society sent from the New York Zoological Gardens in 1913, west by train and then by wagon, and from six more sent down from Yellowstone in 1916. Most of the forty million were killed in a fifty-five year period beginning in 1830. By 1900 there were fewer than a thousand left in North America.
The elk that did not bugle
Erika and I rode bikes with Big and Little in the evening. Then we drove to the visitor center lawn for the seven o’clock ranger program, the first night of the season, where a ranger talks about elk and then everyone follows in a line of cars to a pullout to listen for bull elk bugling.
Roughly thirty other groups came. We stood in the dark at the pullout and heard a gun range going somewhere across the valley, steady and unbothered, and a loud event somewhere else, music or a PA system, the sound arriving flat and without words. No elk. Peak bugling is early October and we were three weeks early, so the bulls may not have had anything to say yet. The ranger took questions for twenty minutes in the dark, and answered them like the questions were good, and then thirty carloads of people drove back to their campsites having heard a rifle range instead.
What was behind the door
At eight the door opened. The park charges no entrance fee. The tours are the only thing with a price on them: $16 for an adult on Natural Entrance and $8 for a child, $14 and $7 for Garden of Eden. I paid the federal government for an hour under the Black Hills. In 1980 the Supreme Court held that the United States had taken those hills from the Sioux Nation without the just compensation the Fifth Amendment requires. The Sioux Nation has refused the money ever since. Taking it would close the claim to the land. It sits in the Treasury, drawing interest.
We took both tours, both with the same ranger. The second one repeated the first and added things she had not said. The couple from the concrete got on the Natural Entrance tour with us.
A hole in the other direction
We had a gap between the two tours, so we drove to Hot Springs to the Mammoth Site, which is a building put up over a hole in the ground with the bones still in the hole. The museum came to them. An equipment operator named George Hanson turned up a tusk with a blade in June 1974 and the lot stopped being a housing development. A warm spring filled a sinkhole here between roughly 190,000 and 140,000 years ago. Warm water meant green plants and open water year round, so animals came down to it, and the walls of the sinkhole were more than a mammoth could climb back up. More than sixty mammoths went in. None came out.
Underground
Three hundred stairs go down on the Natural Entrance tour and you come back out in an elevator. Garden of Eden is a hundred and fifty stairs and takes the elevator both directions. It is a constant 54 degrees down there. Big went down the three hundred ahead of me, and the couple from the concrete was three people back the whole way.
The ceiling in places is covered in boxwork, thin fins of calcite standing out from the rock in a honeycomb, the rock between them dissolved away and gone. It looks like someone built a lattice and then took the wall out from behind it.
The park consults twenty tribal governments on its major plans. The emergence account it publishes is Oglala Lakota, from the Cheyenne Creek community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, told by Wilmer Mesteth, a tribal historian and spiritual leader, to Sina Bear Eagle, who retells it. The ranger told it while we were standing inside the cave rather than leaving it on a panel at the entrance. In the account the first people came up into this world through the small natural opening here, the place the ancestors called Oniya Oshoka, where the earth breathes inside. In modern Lakota the cave is Maka Oniye, breathing earth. The opening is about ten inches wide.
There are 167 miles of mapped passage in Wind Cave, and all of it sits under 1.25 square miles of prairie. We could have walked across the whole surface above the cave in under an hour. The Park Service says they have found less than ten percent of it. They know that because they measure the wind at the entrance. The cave breathes as the air pressure outside changes, and how much air moves tells you how much room is down there to hold it.
Big’s plan (in a few years) is to come back and map the part nobody has been in. He can train with a local grotto, which is what a caving club calls itself, and volunteer to survey new passage. He wants to be the one holding the tape.
Out
We packed up the next morning and drove north toward Badlands. A bison was standing at the park boundary sign, not near it, against it. I slowed down. Little counted flies on its back and got to nine before it swung its head.
Where this happened: Wind Cave National Park