Gribblenation

After leaving Mount Rushmore I headed east on South Dakota State Route 244 to US 16A near Keystone.  I traveled eastbound on US 16A to US 16 which headed towards I-90 near Rapid City.  Along the way I stopped in Rockerville a small ghost town in Pennington County located uniquely between the travel lanes of the US 16 expressway. This blog post is the 7th in the 2016 Summer Mountain Trip series, Part 6 can be found here: 2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 6; Mount Rushmore Rockerville was founded during 1876 at the height of the Black Hills Gold Rush and reached a peak population of about 1,000 by 1880.  Rockerville would see a decline after mining had dwindled in the Black Hills until US 16 became a tourist destination to drive traffic to the Mount Rushmore Area.  US 16 originally traversed Rockerville along Main Street until the modern expressway bisected the community in the 1970s.  Oddly the US 16 expressway wasn't routed along a single side of Rockervil...

After I left Trail Ridge and Rocky Mountain National Park I took US Route 34 to I-25/US 87 north into Wyoming.  My road ahead was in Custer in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This blog is a continuation of Part 2 which covered the Trail Ridge Road of Rocky Mountain National Park. Part 2; Trail Ridge Road/US Route 34 and Rocky Mountain National Park I continued north on I-25/US 87 which briefly picked up US 85 in Cheyanne.  North of Cheyanne the routing of I-25/US 87 was undergoing heavy construction which had traffic onto the shoulder for a solid 20 miles.  Eventually I made it past the construction and pulled off the Interstate onto US 26 in Platte County where I then headed eastbound.  My next turn was north on WY 270 so I could check the ghost towns of Hartville, Sunrise and Manville. Along WY 270 there is a junction for the small 1.1 mile WY 318.  WY 318 heads east from WY 270 through Hartville to the former company town of Sunrise.  Bef...