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Hike The Otter Stream Trail, Not This One
Lake Vermillion State Recreation Area, SD, July 2025 Lake Vermillion State Recreation Area has a figure 8 hiking trail in the western camping area that circles the Maple Campground and passes near Juniper and Oak Campground. The trail is flat smooth and wide. It appears to be a mowed path through the prairie about 4…
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Barnes Canyon Trail
Custer State Park, SD, July 2025 We needed to get some exercise, so we decided to go hiking. Since all the places that we wanted to hike had rattlesnakes or poison ivy, we decided to hike on Barnes Canyon Trail. Since we could not decide which direction to hike from, Kate picked “B”, and we…
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Fisherman Flats Road
Custer State Park, SD, July 2025 On the first day, Kate talked to a park ranger at the Custer State Park visitor center for what seemed like hours. (In reality, it was probably five minutes.) She learned that there should be Green Woodpeckers in the snags at the Fisherman Flats. Translating that to English, there…
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Jewel Cave National Monument & Canyon Hike
Jewel Cave National Monument, SD, July 2025 There are 3 national monuments within an hour of Custer State Park. The monuments are Jewel Cave National Monument, Wind Cave National Monument and Mount Rushmore National Monument. Jewel Cave has a .25 mile, 3.5 mile, and 5.5 mile hike near it. The .25 miles hike starts and…
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Bighorn National Forest (North)
Burgess Junction, WY, July 2025 We stayed at Garryowen, MT because Kate wanted to drive the Northern Route through Bighorn National Forest on Route 14. Route 14 through the forest is almost 60 miles south of Garryowen and about 35 miles long. In total, it is about 2 hours of driving, each way, due to…
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Grand Prismatic Spring Day 39
Yellowstone National Park, WY, June 2025 The plan for today was to get up at 7 am, leave by 8am, and arrive at the Steel Bridge Parking at about 9 am to hike to the Grand Prismatic Spring Overlook and Fairy Falls. John stayed up until about 1 am culling and processing photos and writing…
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Yellowstone National Park Day 38
Yellowstone National Park, WY, June 2025 Yes, we can count; we skipped over day 37. John did some reading on the Canon R7 to change settings to improve the focus. There are three shutter settings – mechanical, electronic first curtain, and electronic. That list goes from slowest to fastest, noisiest to quietest, and most vibration…
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Yellowstone National Park Day 31: NSFK
Yellowstone National Park, WY, Jun 2025 Just a warning, this post may be classified as Not Safe For Kids (NSFK) and squeamish people. We are staying in a huge wilderness space, everyone has to eat, and not everyone is a vegetarian. Except for a few of the marmots, John took pictures holding the camera instead…
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Yellowstone National Park Day 30
Yellowstone National Park, WY, June 2025 We found out that the Natural Bridge Trail was open. They close it in the spring because Bridge Creek has spawning trout that attract bears. Sadly, this means that we missed the spawning trout. We used the trail at Bridge Bay Campground. The trail starts as packed dirt, but…
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Yellowstone National Park Day 29
Yellowstone National Park, MT & WY, June 2025 Nez Perce Picnic Area A couple days ago we went to Nez Perce Picnic Area and saw a Great Blue Heron nest in the far distance. Today, we decided to use a pull off that was closer to the trees in which we saw the nest. (John…