500 000 Bikers!

This post was supposed to be about how I was in nerd heaven because we were going to see Devil's Tower. For those who don't know, the tower played an important role in the 1977 movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/. We'll be watching it again when we get home. I've always thought it would be cool to see the tower. However, soon after we entered Wyoming, we started to see motorcycles. Lots of motorcycles. Marilyn loves to count things and she counted 250 of them in a short period of time. We wondered what was going on. When we got close to Devil's Tower, there were more bikes. We stopped at an area that gave a distant view of the tower and I had to cross the highway to cut the bikes out of the picture. 

When we got into the park area, there were more motorcycles than Marilyn could count. The parking lot looked like this.

I talked to one of the riders and she told me that there was a Bike Week Rally in a town called Sturgis that we would pass through. We thought, oh, that's an hour from where we're staying, we'll be fine. We then went for a nice hike around the tower and got some great views. 

If you get permission and sign forms, you're allowed to climb the tower. We saw a couple of people doing that but I had forgotten my climbing gear so couldn't join them. 

This is an hdr version of the back side of the tower. Marilyn noticed the sun kind of shining through the cloud layer that had rolled in and I took some shots. It looks kind of surreal but the whole place had a bit of a surreal feeling for me. 

On the way out, we were pretty much surrounded by motorcycles. When we got onto the highway and entered South Dakota, we stopped at the visitor centre and talked to a couple of nice ladies who were wearing bike rally t shirts. Oh oh... They happily told us that 500 000 or so bikers were in the area for the week and that they would be staying all throughout the area, even Hill City where we were staying!! As we drove closer to our hotel, we passed hundreds and hundreds of bikers going the other way and thought that was a good sign. But, as we got even closer, every hotel and resort that we saw was swamped with motorcycles. We passed through the town of Deadwood, there was a major traffic jam of... motorcycles.

And as we followed the gps instructions to the hotel we came to a sign like this.

So, we now knew for sure that we were staying in a town full of bikers. Our hotel is next to a gas station and it was like a biker party, but a nice party. We changed and went out for a walk among the bikes and it was great. There are so many cool bikes, mostly Harleys. I'm hoping to get some pictures tomorrow but figure I'll be asking first. Not sure how people feel about pictures of their bikes! We had dinner in one of the local places and I had a Close Encounters moment. For those who have seen the movie, you'll remember the scene where Richard Dreyfus makes a model of Devil's Tower out of his mashed potatoes at dinner and his wife doesn't react well. Marilyn was ok with my efforts. I thought it was a pretty good model.

The rest of our dinner was some really good ribs and an elk/bison burger. We tried a great local beer called Pile of Dirt Porter as well. 

This is the view out our window right now as we are gently serenaded by the sounds of a constant stream of Harleys making their way into our little town. We are here tomorrow as well and will check out Mt. Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial and the biker scene in town. We already have Bike Rally t-shirts but who knows what else will happen?