The White Hills of Dakota

Yesterday the Black Hills reached a record - for the most snow ever recorded in a year ... and we're here to see it! Everywhere looks beautiful, with snow covering trees, hills, cars ... fortunately not roads, which are ploughed so that they are as good as any other time of the year, so it's easy to drive around, providing you only choose bitumen roads.
We arrived at Rapid City on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday visited Keystone (not a cop in sight!) and Mt Rushmore. We expected the carved heads of four presidents - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln - to be interesting, but they were truly spectacular, and we spent several hours at the impressive memorial, viewing, visiting the museum, talking to visitors from all over the USA, and taking photographs - lots of them.
Wednesday and Thursday nights we spent at Custer, a friendly little town very similar to Yea, where Frances grew up. There were other similarities, too ... we woke up to fog so thick that we could only just see to the other side of the road, and a top temperature of minus 3 degrees Celsius. The difference was that the car (a Toyota Corolla) was covered about 15cm thick with snow! We had planned to spend the day driving around the Custer State Park wildlife loop, and visiting the sculpture-in-progress of Crazy Horse, but decided to call a rest day instead, so spent the day reading, sleeping, eating buffalo ribs and elk chilli, and walking around town talking to people - we had a great time!
Today, Good Friday, we awoke to slightly warmer weather and blue skies, so headed for the Wildlife Loop. We saw more than 100 buffalo grazing in different places, some very close to the road, but fortunately on the other side of a "crick", so at a safe distance. They are VERY big! We saw lots of deer, and four big-horn sheep, which were right beside the road ... F asked J to take a close-up photo of one of them, and he did, but somehow only ended up with a photo of its rear end - Oops! We also saw quite a number of wild turkeys - they quite made us hungry!
Today (well, Easter Saturday, but we're 17 hours behind here) is Rick and Jill's wedding, and we thought of them so much as we drove, as bluebirds kept fkying along beside us. We thought that these "bluebirds of happiness" were a wonderful omen, and were thrilled that they (so we're told) have just returned to the area this week - what good luck!
No time left for Crazy Horse, but we drove on to Deadwood, past signs such as "Ghostly Gulch", "Calamity Lane", "Misery Canyon", and so on. Deadwood is FULL of casinos - "Wild Bill Hickock's", "Lucky Kate's" and, believe it or not, "The Fortunate Coves"!!! Declining to visit any of them, we drove to Spearfish along a wonderful river valley canyon - towering rocky cliffs, tall black pines dropping clumps of snow from 20 metres up, the stream flowing between smooth white blankets of snow - it was spectacular!
Tomorrow we leave South Dakota to travel west to Wyoming and north to Montana. Things are getting very "cowboy" here already, so we're practicing our "Howdies"