We finally left the park and drove east into South Dakota (another new state for me), and wound our way through the Black Hills of SD. The scenery was nice, but the multitude of little towns felt a bit touristy, and we had so recently seen such spectacular scenery that the Black Hills couldn’t help but suffer by comparison.
By afternoon, we had made our way to the southwestern corner of the state, where we stopped at the Wind Caves National Park. We took one of the longer tours of the cave, and enjoyed it quite a bit. It was an odd cave, in that it did not have the standard stalagmites and stalactites, but instead had honeycomb-like formation called boxworks, apparently a real rarity in caves.
After the caves, we made a short drive to the town of Hot Springs, where we swam at Evans Plunge, a local pool fed by the area hot springs. Much refreshed and somewhat cleaner, we ate at a local diner and the retreated to the Wind Caves campground to bed down far too late.