So we woke up to snow. (it was supposed to be rain starting at 11am)…so quickly packed up and got out of there (so wouldn’t have to put on chains) and went south 30 min.

Made it to our 8th National Park. Wind Cave National Park.

Wind Cave National Park
Edwin is getting good at setting up the auto timer on the RV
the babushka made it too

We went to the visitor center, saw the movie, and checked out the natural entrance to the wind cave. You could really feel and hear the wind rushing out of there.

The air or “wind” goes from high pressure to low pressure to try and equalize the pressure inside and outside the cave. The oncoming storm made it very “low pressure” outside so the “high pressure” inside the cave made the wind flow out of the cave. It was loud. And was really blowing our hair all around. When the relative pressure is high outside cave compared to inside the cave wind rushes into the cave.

Wind Cave is the 7th national Park to be established in 1903 by Teddy Roosevelt and was the first national park to be established because of a cave.Wind Cave got its name because it is a very large cave and has very few openings so you often hear wind rushing in or out of the cave due to the pressure differential.

The cave is closed so we can not check it out. The elevator has been down since July.

here’s our daily requisite bison pic

You could feel the storm moving towards us so we went another 15 minutes south to Hot Springs, South Dakota and check out the local warm water pools there. It was a fun pool with two indoor waterslides, basketball, steam rooms, and gymnastics rings. The coolest thing about this pool was it had actual river rocks as its floor.

happy to see Hungarian made it way to Hot Springs, South Dakota 🙂
loving these indoor water slides
the water felt so clean and the river rocks were a super fun bottom

We took a break from swimming to go to the Mammoth Dig Site in Hot Springs.

The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs South Dakota is an active digging site. It was a large sinkhole where the animals went looking for food and/or water, got trapped, and couldn’t get out. It is the largest site of Columbia’s mammoths. It is also the only site where Columbian mammoths and wooly mammoths have been found together. They have also found the prehistoric short nosed bear, which just looks scary.

yeah, not a scary looking bear…not big at all
Edwin’s hand to the juvenile short nose bear hand
the bones have been preserved and then placed back where they were found
size of a Colombian mammoth
Mammoths have four molars and they grow 6 sets of molars throughout their lifetime

we went back to Evans Plunge for a quick swim before we drove back up to Wind Cave and camped inside the park.

Oh and then we watched Dances with Wolves with the girls. Here’s Vera with tatanka