An Electric Bike, Devil’s Tower, and Montana

I was in no rush to get back on the road, despite it being the end of Get On! ADV Fest. I took one last stroll through the vendors before they closed. One thing I hadn’t done at all was demo rides, despite brands from Harley-Davidson and Triumph to Moto Guzzi and Zero offering them. I ended up chatting with Jenny Lindquist of Zero, one of two who rode a DSR/X electric adventure bike in the Black Hills BDR-X movie which I’m writing up for ADVRider. I hadn’t expected a demo ride during a short morning, but she got me hooked up to try the bike for myself on a short, easy off-road course. I won’t go into the details here because that will also become an ADVRider article, but suffice it to say it made a believer out of me, especially for less experienced dirt riders like myself. It’s well-balanced, and with no clutch or gears to worry about, I tackled that dirt course at least as well as I rode my KLR, and certainly better than my V-Strom.

My next exciting adventure: laundry! I was having trouble finding a nearby laundromat with enough parking for my van and trailer. But over dinner Saturday night, Amanda Zito clued me in that laundry was available right there at the Buffalo Chip! The prices were reasonable, the machines were old but worked, and at the end of the event, there was no problem parking my whole rig there on my way out. So I got it done and even got to let Lister play outside while we waited, something I don’t get to do in a laundromat parking lot.

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My original plan had been to take my time getting out of Sturgis, do laundry in nearby Spearfish, and spend the night at Chateau Walmart before continuing on. But having my laundry finished just after noon and the beginning of a heat wave changed those plans. I had extra time and a strong incentive to drive with the air conditioning on, rather than park on hot pavement in a Walmart parking lot. So instead I set a course for Red Shale Campground, a free campground near Ashland, Montana just under four hours away. That included a detour across a corner of Wyoming to visit Devil’s Tower, the one sight I wanted to see during my last visit to Sturgis but didn’t.

The drive to Devil’s Tower was easy, first on I-90 and then on smaller state highways once I crossed into Wyoming. I could see it from miles and miles away, towering over the surrounding landscape. No UFOs appeared in the area while I was there.

I’d just bought my annual park pass, so since it was already paid for and I wasn’t on a tight schedule I detoured into Devil’s Tower National Monument. While the big rock itself is quite impressive and well worth my side trip, the park itself didn’t work well for me. Since I have a trailer, I was forced to park in a long vehicle area two miles away from the visitor’s center. From there, I would’ve had to either detach the trailer and take the van the rest of the way, or unload the motorcycle, then strap it down again afterward.

I might have done one of those, but the outside temperature had hit 100º, and even with multiple fans running I didn’t feel it was safe to leave Lister inside the van while I looked around the visitor’s center. It was the same situation I ran into at Gettysburg. So, with regret, I turned around and drove right out of the park again.

To avoid traffic backups at the single entrance lane blocking local businesses, they collected their money on the way out, not as you go in. This was the long line waiting to get out. Fortunately, they soon sent a ranger to walk up the line and check for passes. After seeing mine, he sent me down a bypass lane that let me pass about half the traffic you see in this picture, which was waiting to pay the normal admission fee at the gate. Having the pass also meant that I didn’t have to pay extra for my failed attempt to visit.

Devil’s Tower is one of the oldest National Monuments. Preservation efforts for this area predate the National Park Service itself, going all the way back to 1892 to preserve the surrounding area. President Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Antiquities Act as soon as it was passed in 1906 to declare Devil’s Tower a National Monument, which it remains to this day. When the National Park Service was created in 1916, they took over the administration.

All this is to say that the facilities here are so old, they weren’t designed to handle the amount of people or traffic they see today. Because it’s protected, there aren’t going to be any massive construction projects or upgrades. Visiting with my entire rig in the middle of a Sunday afternoon was probably one of the worst ways I could’ve done it. If I come back this way again, I’ll find somewhere to camp nearby, and take the motorcycle in the middle of a weekday that isn’t 100º.

Before long, I was in Montana, another new state for me. This will also be my last new state on the Big Loop. The next one is Idaho, which I visited last year along with the other western states. While I haven’t entered previously traveled territory yet, as far as the map is concerned I’ve connected the Big Loop together at this point. I have now at least passed through 43 of the lower 48 states. (The 13 miles of Route 66 through Kansas hardly count as a quality visit, but I’ve been there!)

I didn’t take any pictures during this part of the journey. The wind had picked up and started blowing me around a bit, so I kept the speed down and both hands on the wheel to maintain control. In Broadus, I drove past Cottonwood Park, which was my original planned overnight stop for this leg of the trip. It’s simply the town park where overnight parking is allowed. A Sprinter was already setting up for the night. It definitely would’ve worked, but just 30 miles beyond I had a better idea.

Red Shale Campground is a free campground in Custer National Forest near the town of Ashland. The website says there’s a 10-day limit, but the sign at the entrance says 16 days, neither of which is the standard 14-day limit. It doesn’t matter, because I won’t even be here for 10 days. But I do intend to stay for at least a few days, and certainly through the rest of this heat wave. The trees will help keep the sun off my van, except for a few hours of direct sunlight around noon to give my solar panels a quick blast to keep my batteries charged. Starlink won’t work here, but it isn’t working anyway right now, and both of my cellular hotspots do. Lister gets to wander around outside, without me taking off on long motorcycle rides like I had been the past few days. While I grabbed a map that shows plenty of forest service roads in the area, I’m not locking him in the van in this heat. The one thing I may do is take the bike to Ashland for groceries if I need to, which I can do in the morning before it gets hot.

At my last Walmart stop, I tried a suggestion that Birgit made. Instead of dropping $250 on a custom-made bug screen for the Transit, I could drop less than $5 on a sheer curtain and stick it to my side door opening with magnets. There are gaps, but bugs are dumb, and most of them can’t figure out how to get around it. I can see many of them puzzled by it right now, and I only just put it up. If the gap on top turns out to be a problem, I can take it off the bungee I’m using as a curtain “rod” for my blackout curtains, grab a few more magnets, and stick it directly to the wall above the door. I’ll see how this works first, though. Yes, a sheer white curtain is going to get dirty, but if it gets too nasty I can simply replace it. The $250 I would’ve spent on a fancy screen can buy a lot of $5 curtains.

My plan is to stay put here, in the forest, until the heat wave breaks. I’ve found more places to stay than I need between here and the Rocky Mtn Roll, so I’ll just keep slowly making my way west as it makes sense to do so. While I can’t stray too far away from civilization without Starlink, I can still have a few adventures on the way — once the heat wave breaks.