Winter can't last forever. That's a shame because the season dumps a blizzard of beauty and solitude on the Black Hills. Maybe the old man will stick around awhile.

Sugar Bear Falls is a trickle in summer but the cold weaves the driplets into an impressive column of ice. You can find it by making your way to the Little Devil's Tower trailhead (a short hike from Sylvan Lake, the road is closed in winter). A hundred yards or so down, at a saddle in the trail, look for the tracks or path to the left by the large stump between large nodules of rock. This is also a path to Poet's Table, but you all already know all about that. Sugar Bear is tucked into a tight canyon closet and difficult to photograph. You have to be there.

On the way to the Little Devil's Tower trailhead from Sylvan Lake, be sure to check out the Shiprock (if there's already consensus out there on another name I'll concede). You can see it directly north of a sharp bend in the #4 trail, where the blue blaze is marked with an arrow pointing left. The Shiprock closely resembles a motor boat with a cabin, complete with window. In winter, this minnow-never-lost charts a course through the seas of snow.

Your SDPB Outdoors correspondent has written about Grizzly Bear Falls before, but there is a second falls (accessible to adventurous hikers) just a short distance beyond the first, where the unmarked trail from the Grizzly Creek Primitive Campground ends. The "real" Grizzly Falls on USGS maps isn't much more than a gradual rocky decline, but walking there atop the frozen creek takes you through a slot canyon some might call the Grizzly Corridor onto an icy ballroom floor.  

You don't need a four-wheel drive to immerse yourself in white magic. In a ghostly fog, the winter mystique hovers thickly over even Rapid City's own Hansen-Larson Memorial Park.

Here's a few more shots of what you may have been missing.