SOUTH DAKOTA
South Dakota Cave Tours & Wineries
I bet the title of this blog post really took you by surprise! I know this whole experience was unexpected for me. In addition to having surprisingly tall mountains, South Dakota also has some of the longest cave systems in the world.
For both Jewel Cave and Wind Cave you will need to book your tours in advance. We were lucky, one of them had just finished renovating their elevator when we were there.
We started with the Jewel Cave Scenic tour at 11:30 AM.
The name Jewel Cave does not come from actual jewels. Instead, it’s for these run of the mill crystal veins:
The rock formations were pretty cool. There’s some stuff that looks like an alien planet, and then you can see right in the middle of this picture a rock straw.
This is what the tour guide called cave bacon:
We had time in between tours to eat lunch that we had packed. The parks are roughly thirty minutes from each other.
Wind Cave is an ordained national park, but it’s actually smaller which is interesting. We signed up for the Natural Entrance tour at 2:30 PM.
It was first discovered by this tiny hole making a whistling sound.
Inside it’s not that different from Jewel Cave. The ambience was a little different, and this cave had a story of the early tours where a 17 year old kid explored many miles of it by candle light and a string. They also used to take tours with people where he’d decide to randomly explore a new leaf of the cave with tourists in tow.
I thought these postbox formations were really cool!
The deepest parts of these caves are continued to be explored by volunteer spelunkers. It blows my mind because the guide described getting to unexplored sections requires doing miles of belly crawling through tight passageways. But down at the bottom there’s a bunch of cool, unexplained rooms and phenomena like underground lakes that are weird colors for unknown reasons.
After we finished up things get a little hazy because we decided we’d do some wine tasting. It’s been well over a month but we’ll see if I remember everything. Thank god for Google Map’s timeline!
We started at Twisted Pine Tasting Room in Hill City. The woman helping us was delightful. The wines were pretty sweet, not much more to say than that. I think I can say the wine was smoother than I expected and I didn’t get a horrible hang over later.
From there we headed to Firehouse Brewing Company where we got flights of wine and much, much needed food. I thought the burger was actually really good, and the wines were also really fun and interesting. All of us got to try different types of wine too which was cool. The bartender was also pretty funny and chatted with us.
We made a pit stop at Naughti Wines / Sick-N-Twisted which has the exact vibe you’d imagine. We got flights of wine here as well and, like Twisted Pine, I thought the wine was all actually very drinkable, but very sweet and without much nuance.
At this point we we hungry again so we headed to Mackenzie River Pizza, Grill and Pub. It turns out that’s a mall restaurant but that’s okay, we needed more carbs or else we’d have died. I don’t even remember how the food was, but I do have a picture of a beer, and I remember our waitress having an incredible memory for what we ordered.
We headed back to the airbnb to prepare for an ungodly early morning the next day to catch our flights home.
Funnily enough, when we did get to the airport that next morning, and were waiting for Steven’s flight, they were asking people if they’d give up their seat for a travel voucher. So Steven did and was able to drive back home with Courtney in the car!