James Butler Hickok was shot in Saloon No. 10 in 1876, a time when Deadwood, South Dakota, was on the fringe of the frontier, a place where ending up face-down dead on your poker hand was not an altogether surprising end to an evening.
On a Friday night in mid-February, my buddy Peter Peil and I stepped into Saloon No. 10 and found that although Deadwood's historic Main Street has retained the look and feel of the Old West, the Calamity Janes and Charlie Utters who hung with Hickok have been replaced by cliques of Patagonia-clad 20-somethings drinking Jell-O shots, cowboy-booted 30-somethings escaping nearby Rapid City, and the kids on a girls' weekend out and a hair cover band in ripped jeans butchering "Sweet Child of Mine."
In fact, thanks to a 1989 law legalizing limited-wage gambling in Deadwood, the town's rich history has been trumped by the neon-lit jangling of slot machines tended by blue hairs and Rapid City suburbanites. We made the best of it by stuffing ourselves on a crab leg buffet, trying to find a run of luck at the blackjack tables and parking ourselves on bar stools with front-row views of Saloon No. 10's meat-market shenanigans.
With the myriad of historical sites closed for the day, we escaped the neon streets of Deadwood to a two-room rental cabin nestled in the hills and drank Fat Tire Ale, stoked the woodstove and talked about what drew us to the land of Wild Bill's famous "Dead Man's Hand" in the first place: the opportunity to explore the expanse of good riding country in the Black Hills.
The Black Hills are a broad-shouldered deposit of sediment known as the Pierre Formation, which rises above the oat fields and abandoned grain harvesters of southwestern South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. This giant dome of rock and till is creased with deep valleys and dimpled with peaks as high as 7200 feet. The pine-needle-blanketed lump of granite and limestone has borne the weight of a wide variety of creatures, ranging from the Tyrannosaurus rex to General Custer and Crazy Horse to Kevin Costner. The remains of the first three are being dug up by paleontologists and anthropologists, while the latter is the only one who left more than a skeleton-he owns Jake's, a restaurant in Deadwood decorated with Costner-abilia, including costumes from Dances With Wolves.
The Black Hills are also home to Sturgis (the motorcycle rally, in case you have been living in a cave), Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument and the 1.2-million-acre Black Hills National Forest
The forest is covered with a vast network of fire roads, trails and goat paths, much of it open to ORV use. That said, there are no ORV-specific trail maps available, and the state offices are not actively promoting off-road riding here. I stopped in at the ranger station in Rapid City, a sprawling South Dakota plains town of nearly 60,000 located on the eastern edge of the Black Hills. When I asked about ORV riding opportunities, the response was less than enthusiastic.
"Well, I think you can ride some of the unmarked trails," a dour tourism office employee said. "But I'm really not sure."
He sold me a Black Hills National Forest map, which is the best map currently available for off-roaders. Numbered trails and roads are shown, and the bulk of the trails in the national forest carry some kind of marking. A call to the national forest headquarters yielded more detailed information on the area's off-road riding status. In South Dakota, the ORV regulations are fairly relaxed. Any road that is two-track, meaning it has a strip of grass in the middle, is open to ORV use. No permits are required for ORVs.
Across the border in the Wyoming portion of the Black Hills, you have to get a Wyoming state ORV sticker, and ORV use is even less restricted. The Wyoming Black Hills National Forest ORV map lists which areas are open to use. On most publicly owned lands, all roads are open for ORV use, and off-trail riding is prohibited.