The next day we went to this trail around this lake. It was slated at Custer Park’s easiest trail and only one mile. Shoot, we can handle that. It was a beautiful place

We could see the trail on the other side.

And the trial is nice and level and fairly smooth. I don’t think I’ll need my walking sticks for this one. We could see that the trail went up to that rock mountain. They must have a trail that goes along the lake in front of that mountain.

So we start off on the trail until we come to the where the trail ends by the mountain

So we follow everyone else as they pass thru a tall narrow crack in the mountain. There is a kid hanging between the two sides dangling as he presses his hands to each side of the mountain. Of course everyone wanted to take a picture of him. I could see his arms start to shake, you’re good kid, I don’t want you falling on me when your arms go out.

So we head thru the crack, suck it in baby! There is a family in front of us telling their daughter, it’s ok, you can do it, just keep going. She was scared poopless. I hope she doesn’t stop half way through and trap us all.

When we get thru the crack, there are steps down that they carved out of the rock. They were definitely not up to code and this girl is standing at the top whimpering. My sis-in-law offers to help her down, no thanks says the girl so we just blow by her. I hope her family keeps an eye on her and help her more than some encouraging words.

When we got past the steps, we were behind the dam.

So we followed the trail a little further and found a spot where they were teaching people how to rock climb.

They even had little kids up there

And then that was where the easy trail ended. We ended up following people cause we prayed they knew where they were going. As we are continuing up the trail I heard a small child screaming, “No, No, I can’t do it, don’t make me” and an adult encouraging the kid, “you made it up, you can make it down. See, watch me” “No! No! I can’t do it!” I hope they didn’t just push the kid off the cliff “See, that was easy!” That screaming went on for quite a while but I knew there was no way I was going to be of any assistance to that tortured child. That will teach the kid to do what ever it’s parents tell it to do. “It will be fun, come on, you can do it”

As we continued on the trail, we had to take a few rests along the way

After climbing up that, we came to some more giant steps that went up and thru a couple of rocks. The trail wasn’t marked worth a crap and we figured we didn’t want to walk all the way up those giant steps to find out it was the wrong way. There was a guy behind us with a couple of dogs. We asked him if he could go up and see if that was the way the trail continued or if we should be going another way. He went up, looked over the edge and told us to come on, it didn’t look too bad, the thought we could make it. Such a nice young man

Once we made it over that, it was all down hill from there and back to the nice smooth path that we saw on the other side of the lake. The moral of this story, don’t let you sister-in-law pick the trails

Dang, it sucks to have old bones. We went back to the campsite and had some Honey to take care of the aches and pains. We’d be heading back home tomorrow with our last stop at Bob’s Campground in Gettysburg, SD.