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Exploring Lake Vermilion
Lake Vermilion State Recreation Area, SD, August 2025 Lake Vermillion is named after the Vermillion River. Vermillion is an alternate spelling of Vermilion, the reddish-orange color. The river gets its name from the seams of reddish-orange sandstone along the banks. People just lack imagination. At least, it is not the reddish-orange river. Yesterday, we had…
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Can I Burro a Bag of Salad?
Custer State Park, SD, July 2025 The Burros are descendants of the ones used to haul visitors up to the top of Black Elk Peak before the tours were discontinued in the 1930s. They are not native to the Black Hills of South Dakota. We had driven by the place the Burros hung out a…
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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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Night in the Park: Part 2
Custer State Park, SD, July 2025 It was foggy much of the day, but it cleared up in the early evening. We decided to look for nocturnal wildlife again on the wildlife loop. On the drive, we were almost hit by a Common Nighthawk. It was close to where we saw on the last time.…
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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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BOOF Pictures
Garryowen, MT, July 2025 If you read about wildlife photography, you might run into the acronym BIF, and you might see that it is the “Holy Grail” of wildlife photography. BIF stands for “Birds in Flight”. It is a difficult, aggravating, and time consuming form of wildlife photography. If often requires a great deal of…
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The Glamorous Night Life of State Parks
Custer State Park, SD, July 2025 See the glamorous night life of Custer State Park in Blur-o-Vision (patent pending)! Kate and John sat through an hour long park presentation about nocturnal animals. It was definitely geared towards kids, and the yammering and squalling kids made it hard to hear the presentation. Mostly, we learned that…
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North Yellowstone Day 37: Part 2
Yellowstone National Park, WY, June 2025 This is part two of our drive to north Yellowstone. Part one has not been posted, yet. These are the pictures that I took with the Canon T7i for comparison to the Canon R7. For this day, the Canon R7 was set to electronic shutter and high speed burst…
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Mountain Meadow Wool Mill
Buffalo, WY, July 2025 Last time we were in Buffalo, Wyoming, I wanted to visit the Mountain Meadow Wool Mill. Unfortunately, we were not able to visit because we were only in town for 5 nights and we didn’t have time. So, I had drag John to the mill along with the other errands of…
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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…