Pullin' Chocks

Hot Springs, South Dakota

Sadly we departed Rapid City and struck out for our next stop over, Hot Springs, South Dakota.  We hoped to see the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs and stay at a State Park on Angostura Lake.  We settled into a nice campsite with a peek-a-boo view of Horsehead Creek, one of the branches of Angostura Lake.

Angostura Lake is one of the larger lakes that we visited and has a hydroelectric dam facility. 

Hot Springs is a very small town and the people are very friendly. There was a pretty waterfall right in the middle of town.  

This is a shot of the local government building right next to the Bates Motel...

We visited the Mammoth Site as we had desired and it turned out to be even better than I had anticipated.  The story really brought together the fascinating geology and paleontology that we had been observing during our time in the Black Hills.

The geology story is very old, a few billion years old, 4.6 billion to suggest a number.  In that time the Black Hills were formed along with the Rocky Mountains.  Upwelling of magma pushed the rock layers upward to form the Rocky Mountains and Black Hills.  The layers of limestone and shale inherent to the Black Hills are what made the Mammoth Site possible.  The limestone being very porous allows water to seep into cracks setting up erosion and then caves, which we witnessed at Jewel Cave, one of the many cave systems in the Black Hills.  At the Mammoth Site, such a cave formed then collapsed forming a sink hole.  This happened only 27,000 years ago, relatively recent in the grand scheme of things.  The water in the limestone sprung up as an artesian well and filled the sink hole with water that was 50+ degrees year round.  This allowed the grasses to grow very well even during the cold Dakota winter months and what ultimately lured the animals into the pit.  It was
the shale layer that prevented the animals from escaping the pit.  That shale gets very slippery when wet. 

The Black Hills timeline finally came together for us at the Mammoth Site after seeing and hearing it at several of our previous tours at other attractions.  The hills formed a few billion years ago, the dinosaurs showed up between 50-250 million years ago, and the mammoths arrived only 27,000 years ago.  Big time differences indeed!  The dinosaur bones found around the Black Hills are fossils; the bone is replaced with minerals and are like stone.  The mammoth bones are really bones, preserved by the unique shale mud of the Dakotas.

The capture scenario of the pit went on for only about 900 years, a mere blip in time!  We know 67 Mammoths have been discovered in the pit so far, and the scientists expect there are a hundred or more individual remains in there yet to be discovered. The Mammoth Site pit is only about 250 feet by 120 feet and they have covered 90% of it with a large hangar type building.

The dig site is an active dig and all of the findings are left just as they are found.  It dramatically demonstrates the positions of the animals as they struggled in the mud of the pit.  They have found both Wooly and Colombian Mammoths, the only place in the world where both have been discovered together.  They also found Short-faced Bear in the pit, which make a Grizzly Bear look like a ground squirrel! The mammoth specimen below was one of the older and most complete skeletons found.  Since this one was older the bones were more fused together by the more developed cartilage and therefore the scientist found that there was "no pulling his bones apart" so they named him Napoleon Bonaparte.  

Downstairs was a laboratory where the students worked with some artifacts.  You could see the workstations through the windows.  That is a mammoth tooth in the mold below left.