September 6-13, 2025

This is the first posting of my final trip of the year that lasted seven weeks. The first week objective was to head north through New Mexico, Colorado, and South and North Dakota. The first photographic opportunity was in Chama, NM where I found the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad loading up passengers. I did not take the train ride, but ended up following its route from a nearby road.

The first scenes are in the rail yard in preparation for the departure.

By consulting a map it appeared that the train would follow the route of a road, so the race was on to get ahead of the train at various points in order to photograph the on coming train. The first stop was at a road crossing of the tracks and sure enough the whistle and clouds of smoke marked the oncoming train.

There were several cars that were doing the same thing as me and we kept leap frogging ahead multiple times until the train route veered from the road.

The next morning I was in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. In a serendipity moment from the first observation point, a deer with a nice set of antlers appeared just below. Then after a short walk down the path and the deer proceeded through a bit of a meadow and jumped the fence not twenty feet from me and a few other spectators.

The Garden of the Gods is known for its redrock spires.

The next day, I traveled through Custer State Park just south of the Black Hills. This a famed location for bison herds (some people incorrectly call them buffalo). I was not disappointed and found two herds right along the road. I did not even need my telephoto lens as they were that close to the edge and sometimes on the road.

You can get the idea of the size of the herds in the next several photos.

As you have seen the bison are not that photogenic and are pretty dirty. My criterion was to be able to see the open eyes.

In the Black Hills, I hired a jeep to take me through Iron Mountain Road and Needles Highway because there are a number of tunnels that the camper van could not fit through. The guide said that the road and tunnels were specifically constructed to frame a view of Mount Rushmore multiple times.

I did not actually go to the Mount Rushmore site, so these are all views from the road.

If you go to the Mount Rushmore site (which we did in 2019) this is almost the same view you get up closer.

Next we started on the Needles Highway and got a little wet in the open roof jeep.

You can see in the next photos, why it’s called the Needles Highway from the granite spires.

The rock on the left above sure looks like a man’s face!

The following morning in Hill City, I knew there was another scenic train, the 1880 Black Hills Train, so I went there to photograph the preparations for departure. This engine was on display.

It was actually a little complicated to get the engine on the right track. This is the engine backing out of it’s parking spot. Throughout these photos I really liked the clouds of steam expelled from the engine.

The engine was switched onto a track that took it out of the yard. Then it began backing up on the track to hook up the train.

It was next interesting to see it stop at the water tank to take on water.

After backing up some more it hooked up to the passenger cars and proceeded out of the yard.

On the south side of Rapid City I found the Norwegian Lutheran Church, the Chapel in the Hills. Built in 1969, this is an exact replica of Norway’s 12th century Borgund stave church. Inside there were beautiful wood carvings as well as carvings on the roof.

The visiter center is an authentic grass-roofed store house called Stabbur.

I then drove further east to the Badlands with many hills and rock formations. Most were not very colorful, partially due to me being there at midday.

For lunch, I stopped at the world famous Wall Drug, which now is a huge shopping mall for tourist souvenirs. Wall drug was opened in December 1931 in a town of 326 people at the start of the depression. They barely hung on until 1936 and finally had the idea to offer free ice cold water to travelers on the road out front and the rest is history. They also had a soda fountain counter which also helped the business. Today there are signs all over South Dakota to stop at Wall Drug which now occupies two full city blocks. Hundreds maybe even thousands of people visit every day (2 million a year) – it is an experience not to be missed if you are in South Dakota. I did find the actual drugstore in the center of it all with memorabilia and a painting of the founder. If you want to see more try Walldrug.com.

I stayed two nights in Spearfish, SD and the following morning drove down Spearfish Canyon which had high rock walls, waterfalls, and the first hints of fall color.

The first waterfall is called Bridal Veil Falls. The second one is called Roughlock Falls and was hard to get photos as I was very close and the water was dropping into a deep ravine.

In the afternoon I visited Lead and had lunch in Deadwood. The next morning I headed to North Dakota, which was the 50th state that I have visited. The attraction there was the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I visited the southern unit of the park with a variety of terrain but mostly more badlands. The trees were beginning to show some fall color.

There was a section of hoodos which are rocks on top of an eroding base material under them.

Then there were some badlands features with more eroding rocks.

Finally I saw a few bison and a small herd of wild horses which were bunched together so they could swish away each other’s flies.