Motorcycle Rallies All Look the Same | Post 29 | South Dakota
Am I in New Hampshire? What happens at Rapid City, South Dakota, is enough to make the Street View traveler think there’s a glitch in Google’s mappery.
Here’s the last photo I grabbed east of Rapid City:
And here’s the first one I took to its west:
It’s as if Rapid City sits wedged at a magazine’s crease, between an article about open prairies and brown buttes and, facing, a separate piece on tall pines, notched valley roads, the thick green of a place that’s white in winter, and Indian Motorcycles.
The current “article” is somehow, instantly, totally ecologically different from the previous one. As surprising for me, though, is that I used to go on northern New England family road trips that look exactly like it:
And also, though I don’t recall, probably like this:
Yet this is not the White Mountains, Franconia Notch, or Laconia Motorcycle Week. It is western South Dakota and Black Hills National Forest. The bikes? New Hampshire may be famous for Gypsy tours and scant helmet laws, but with motorcycles everywhere on this segment from Nemo through Deadwood and Lead, I had to do some cross-referencing: My Street View images were date-stamped August 2012, precisely coinciding, Wikipedia told me, with the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, where “attendance has historically been around one half million people, reaching a high of over 700,000 in 2015, and generating around $800 million in revenue.”
Indeed, I’d been clicking just miles from Sturgis proper, and roadside bars were packed with bikers and bikes, many with the low-slung, heavy stature of the Indian make (founded, it geographically turns out, in 1901 in Springfield, Massachusetts). The first Sturgis rally was held in 1938 — nine riders participated in a singe race— and the event has grown such that sales of program guides and sponsorship slots today yield 95 percent of the City of Sturgis’s annual revenue. Wikipedia further offers: “There has been a number of mysterious, unsolved deaths at the Rally.”
Street View travelers will endorse the scenic venue selections of motorcycle enthusiasts, but just like New Hampshire, greater Sturgis features eccentric roadside attractions, the kinds of splashy, isolated anomalies one simply can’t anticipate encountering in the vicinity of a national forest: A vintage Standard Oil tower; the colorful Boondocks Diner complex, with Ferris wheel; a massive bust of Abraham Lincoln at the entrance to a defunct park bearing 42 other massive presidential busts.
I crossed into Wyoming and stopped at Four Corners. Wikipedia is silent on the etymology of the town name. The principal intersection looks like this:
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Rapid City, S.D.
- Nemo, S.D.
- Lead, S.D.
- End: Four Corners, Wyo.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
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Federal Regulation of Apostrophes, and Other Stories About Land | Post 30 | Wyoming
