After that, we stopped at Mt. Rushmore again for a view of the mountain by day.  The mountain is truly majestic, impressive and just really cool.  Mt. Rushmore is small in size compared to our next stop, Crazy Horse Monument.  We decided, however, to forego paying the $20 it would take to enter Crazy Horse, just took a few pictures, and left.  We were disappointed by the huge, but unfinished mountain sculpture.  A few miles down the road in the beautiful Black Hills is Wind Cave National park, our second NP.  Wind Cave has about 124 miles of cave all squeezed into a 1x1 square mile area, and is famous for its "windy" conditions within.  We took a tour of the cave that lasted 1.5.   The cave boasted some cool rock formations, box work, popcorn, etc., but we thought the tour was a little bland.  We saw a large herd of Buffalo in the fields on top of the caves, and then drove to Hot Springs, SD. 

We bypassed the touristy looking thermal swimming pool, and decided to try out our Kayaks for the second time.  We drove to Lake Angostura, which is a beautiful dammed reservoir in the southern Black Hills region.  The weather was perfect, and we let the wind take us out to the middle of the lake, which was full of fishermen and speed boats.  After relaxing a bit in the lake, we started paddling back towards the dock.  What started out as a calm trip turned out to be quite a work out, as we had to fight the fierce winds to get back to shore.  We finally got back, but not after some hard work!  After packing up the car, we drove through Wyoming to Greeley, Colorado, where we stayed at the Lambda Chi Alpha at the University of Northern Colorado.