Mickelson Trail Day

 

Mickelson Trail Day 1

Hill City to Edgemont 

During the summer of 1980, between my junior and senior year of college, I fought wild land fires for the Division of Forestry, then part of SD Game, Fish and Parks. Our crew was stationed in Hot Springs, SD on the southern end of the Black Hills. 

When the fire danger turned up with the summer heat, trains laden with coal would chug slowly north along the Burlington Northern Rail line from Edgemont to Deadwood and on to WY. The coal fed the hungry coal fire power plant out of Gillette. Occasionally those Iron Horses would spark fires as their steel round hooves bit into the parallel lines they followed. So once or twice a week a fire crew and their engine would meet the train in Edgemont and follow it as best they could north, usually being relieved by a USFS crew in Pringle. A train conductor carried a fire radio and could call if he saw smoke from a fire caused by the train. As the newbie  on the crew, I got to go only once, towards the end of the summer after most of the crew left early for school. It was an uneventful patrol, but I got to see some new and gorgeous country. 

In 1983 BN abandoned the branch line and soon the rails were stripped and the easements retired. A group of forward thinking folk thought the line would make a wonderful rails to trails path. There was of course some opposition. However, then Gov George Mickelson championed the project in 1991 and by 1998 the 109 mile, first of its kind in SD, rails to trails was completed. The trail now bears Gov Mickelson’s name in memorial after his tragic death from an airplane crash in 1993. 

For a 100 years prior, the line transported people, freight, cattle, lumber, and mining supplies to communities like Argyle, Pringle, Custer, Hill City, Lead and Deadwood. 

Today we left Hill City riding south on crushed limestone to Edgemont traveling through forest, open Jack pine savannah, prairie cattle country and through Sheep Canyon to the southern terminus in Edgemont where we are camped in the city campground. It’s only appropriate that we are next to active BN line, still hauling coal, but around a flatter route depriving some college kid on the fire crew from taking a day away from the business end of a Pulaski.