South Dakota Gems

Continuing our trek eastward across South Dakota, we landed at Cow Creek State Recreation Area just north of the capitol city of Pierre.  Cow Creek is one of the "fingers" off of the Oahe Reservior.  It is a very popular area for all kinds of water recreation, especially fishing.  While we were there, we talked to an old friend from home, Tony Omitt.  Tony is an avid fisherman, and was talking to us from his boat as one of his buddies reeled in a nice Walleye!

It was Labor Day weekend, so the campground was full until Monday afternoon when everyone left and we had the place to ourselves.  We took Guido for walks along the lake - he still doesn't like the water, but I did get him to step his front feet in.

This was also where we filmed my ALS Ice Bucket challenge video - twice!  We are such losers with technology that we had to do it two days because we didn't know how to run the video function on my iPad - duh!

We needed some groceries one day, so we went in to Pierre.  It is a nice, small city with a beautiful capitol building with lovely grounds and a memorial park.

The park had a pathway around the lake with memorials to all of the armed services and to firefighters & policemen.  I got a kick out of the ducks laying at the feet of this memorial sculpture.

From Cow Creek, we went to another South Dakota State Park - Fisher Grove.  It is a small campground (only 22 sites) where the James River winds around so that almost every site is on the river.

Another plus - a nine hole golf course!  Ron & I had to play a round, just to prove how bad we really are!

From Fisher Grove, we came to Hartford Beach State Park on Big Stone Lake, which is on the border between South Dakota and Minnesota.  Again, it was a beautiful reservoir with two very nice campgrounds.  We were in the west campground, which was on the lake.  Most of the campsites were wooded.  The east campground overlooked the lake and had many large sites.

There were also lots of trails to hike on.  The only downside was that the mosquitos were terrible.  We had very few neighbors, but we did have a couple of visitors.

It was fun to explore a few of the South Dakota State Parks.  They were all very well kept up, clean and the people were friendly, so we will definitely go to more of them.  And, being from the land of 10,000 lakes, I did get a kick out of this sign:

 

For more info: South Dakota State Parks