The Rise Up Ride: Day 12,The Mississippi to the Missouri, From Dakota to Lakota Land
Date: 4 May 2021
Start Location: Wessington Springs, South Dakota
End Location: Tailrace Campground on the West Bank of the Missouri River
Distance: 78.7km
Time: 4:49
Total elapsed: 7:38
Elevation: 532 m
Traveling across the Northern Great Plains at 18 km per hour, on a good day with a favorable breeze, is a fully-dimensioned adventure. In a car, on a flat map, you move fast from city to city. By bicycle my references are the terrain. I've ridden from the eastern bank of the Mississippi River to the western bank of the Missouri River, lived its ups and downs, weathered the raw spells that are Spring on the Prairie, and watched with keen attention as the land is coming back to life as I roll through it.
Today's ride was a straight shot due west from Wessington Springs to Fort Thompson on the Crow Creek Hunkpati Oyate Reservation, Dakota land. Such a calm day, cool, sunny and so unlike the cold relentless windstorm of yesterday.
After breakfast at Sweet Grass, the quaint local farmer bohemian eatery in an artistically converted car dealership, I circled back to the motel to retrieve one of my 1.5 lb packages of beef jerky that I'd left in the fridge. Kelly, who had offered to drive out and rescue me yesterday from the wind, felt awful that she had already cleaned the room and tossed the meat. Not unfamiliar with dumpster diving in my wilder days, I was blue bib knickers up in the air and reaching down to snatch my jerky out of the trash. Double-wrapped in the vacuum-wrap and a ziploc, it will be tasty with rice tonight.
I'm at the Tailrace Campground, where my National Park Senior Lifetime Pass got me a campsite for $9. It's just below the damn and between both forks of the Missouri River, surrounded by water and all the migrating nature moving up and down this natural corridor from the Gulf to the Rockies. Tomorrow it's off through Lokota land to spend two nights camping in Kennebec. Knee good. Spirits high.
