One of the things we wanted to try on this trip was an overnight backpacking trip which Avery has never done. Mom wasn’t excited about us spending the night out in the woods with no way to contact anyone in bear country, so we decided to give it a try in the Black Hills as there are no permanent bear populations there. They do pass through from time to time.
Dad read through some trail blogs and chose a trail called the Horse Thief Trail that some locals had recommended as a good first timer’s overnight trip. Unfortunately, Dad didn’t do a good job choosing as for the first couple miles of the trail, the creek was running through it much of the way. This made for lots of slogging uphill through water and mud with plenty of mosquitos buzzing around. Dad could tell that Avery wasn’t having much fun walking through the mud and offered to turn around several times, but to her credit she didn’t want to quit and chose to keep going.
Luckily we finally left the soggy areas and were able to find a campsite for the night that actually had a pretty nice view if we climbed up some rocks that were close by. So, we set up the kitchen on the “veranda”, cooked dinner and watched the sun go down. The next morning we got up early, broke camp, and hiked back out to civilization to get the RV that we had stashed at a campground. Then we hooked up and headed off to visit Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.
