She had me at yaks.
I was interested in Trump, of course, and the fireworks, the Fourth of July and Mount Rushmore. That’s all pretty good stuff, even to a semi-retired newsman with a casual approach to his work schedule.
But yaks? They sealed the deal.
It didn’t hurt that I already knew Julie Smoragiewicz and considered her a credible source. After university level jobs in other states, she worked for 15 years as vice president of university relations at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
Then she moved a few blocks from Mines to downtown Rapid City where she owned and operated a sweet little deli, gourmet market, bake shop and bistro. It was close enough to the Rapid City Journal for a quick lunch. Always good stuff.
I knew she’d since moved to the woods with her husband, Jim, but I didn’t know where or why. Then I received her Facebook message about my recent Rapid City Journal column on COVID-19 and summer tourism. In the column, I worried about COVID-19 control at big events like the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and the return of fireworks to Mount Rushmore National Memorial, which President Donald Trump apparently plans to attend.
You might have heard about that big Fourth of July event. If you did, you heard wrong. Presuming it comes off as planned, the fireworks display and the president’s visit will be on the Third of July, although that’s not what Newsweek online said. And that’s one of many reasons Smoragiewicz is worried about what’s coming and how it’ll be handled.
“There’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of confusion, and a lot of misunderstanding about what it’s going to be like,” she said when I called her to chat.
She has a personal investment in the issue. Her place in the woods these days is just off Highway 16 this side of the Keystone Wye, then down a gravel lane past the Cosmos Mystery Area to a right turn on a narrower lane. There among the rock outcroppings and ponderosa pine and bur oak and quaking aspen, Smoragiewicz hustles around handling the business of a small cabin-rental operation called Yak Ridge Cabins.
They’re nice newer cabins, in a nice older setting. And the yaks are in the back, part of a hobby farm atmosphere bolstered by chickens and honeybees and available for tour by cabin customers or visiting reporters.
Smoragiewicz does most of the work at Yak Ridge while her wildlife-trained, fishing-inspired husband helps out around his work in the pharmaceutical business. The cabin business is all about bookings, of course, and bookings were brisk when word got out about the fireworks and Trump.
That’s good, up to a point.
“We’ve been booked since the announcement. People are expecting to see the president. And they’re thinking they can go to Mount Rushmore anytime during that weekend,” Smoragiewicz said. “And I just think we’re setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment and some safety issues.”
Getting up there and back isn’t like going to Disneyland
Smoragiewicz has had some experience with these kinds of complicated events. At Mines she helped plan for the visit by Vice President Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign. Years earlier while admissions director at the University of Toledo, she helped prepare for visits there by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Such events are complicated enough at a manageable venue in a city with multiple-option access routes and ample response resources. Move them up to the granite heights of a mammoth national memorial in a sprawling national forest (No, Mr. President, it’s not all rocks) with complex ingress and egress and you can multiple the many ways things can go wrong.
Throw in a pandemic that has just begun to reach western South Dakota and you can imagine why Smoragiewicz is concerned.
“I don’t think people have a good sense of the landscape and the terrain. It’s not like going to Disneyland where you might have six lanes going in both directions and a huge facility,” she said. “However, it’s planned, visitors need to know they can expect long delays, lots of security, traffic snarls, maybe health checks. And also, we just need to make sure they have the date right.”
If I may interject (And who’s going to stop me?), I love Mount Rushmore. I visit every year, multiple times. It never gets old. But I have zero interest in joining the barely constrained collective of craziness you can expect — based on fireworks of the past —at and near the memorial prior to, during and after the fireworks display.
I’ve watched one firework show at Mount Rushmore in person. And by “in person” I mean from Black Elk Peak, about four miles southwest and 1,500 feet higher than Mount Rushmore. Sitting atop Black Elk, a sacred place appropriately renamed from Harney Peak four years ago in honor of Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk, puts Rushmore, the fireworks and visiting presidents in proper perspective.
But to each his own. And many who have experienced the colorful eruptions over the four famous faces have found it to be awe inspiring, even if coming and going and waiting inspired other emotions.
Smoragiewicz wants the event to be a success, which means she wants more direction and guidance and information as soon as possible. She understands that some parts of the president’s role in the drama will have to remain confidential.
“I think it would really be helpful to have one single point of contact with valid information out there as soon as possible,” she said. “Whatever happens is going to be shifting. But even if there’s just one place people can check for current data. If some of that has to be secret, I think people would understand that.
“One single website could go a long way to help and reduce the chance that people are going to be disappointed and unhappy, and that the Black Hills and South Dakota will end up looking bad,” she said.
Sure, try the social distancing but forget about the hydroxychloroquine shake
Most reasonable people don’t want that, least of all the reasonable people working in the governor’s office. And senior adviser Maggie Seidel told my full-time South Dakota Public Broadcasting colleague Seth Tupper recently that options to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are being considered.
Seidel said those could include limited attendance with social distancing at the fireworks display. Maybe the president and a small group in attendance, and everyone else watches on TV? Maybe most people watch from cars?
Or maybe everyone who attends in person could walk through a Clorox mister and drink a chocolate-flavored hydroxychloroquine milkshake?
OK, OK, that last idea was mine, not Seidel’s. And I was just kidding. Really. Seriously. I do not recommend bathing in bleach or slurping hydroxychloroquine malts. But I do recommend taking a big dose of patience, and maybe a little ibuprofen, if general attendance is allowed at the fireworks display.
With or without COVID, problems will explode along with the rockets’ red-white-and-blue glare. Keystone lodge owner Tammy Hunsaker made that pretty clear when she told Tupper: “Traffic comes to a standstill at about 10 o’clock that morning and doesn’t move. And so, it’s not an outstanding day business-wise for our community.”
It’s good for the larger Black Hills tourism game, however, and most promoters in the region seem happy the fireworks will return, presuming nothing changes
But Mount Rushmore is, all presidential commentary to the contrary, located in a forest. With trees. Lots of them. And at certain times, the forest and the trees are highly vulnerable to ignition and exploding into dangerous, damaging wildfires.
People who follow the news know this. So do people with common sense. So, the idea of shooting fireworks over a forest, while impressive, comes with a serious downside. And that downside gets bigger as the forest gets drier.
It’s unclear how dry the forest around Rushmore will be the first week in July. So, this show is not a sure thing. Or at least it should not be.
When the National Park Service decided in 2010 not to have the fireworks show at Mount Rushmore, it was not a casually considered decision. The forest was dry. A pine beetle infestation had made things even worse. The fire potential was ridiculous.
And when you think about it, the general idea of firing flaming missiles over a forest for public entertainment is a little nutty. Dozens of firefighters had to be stationed in place and roaming the forest below and around the display at Rushmore to extinguish the small blazes started by the fireworks. They did, but the potential for one to get away was always there.
Beyond the fire danger, there’s the litter and water pollutants
The fireworks show left litter in the forest, some of which is still being picked up. You and I would get in lots of trouble for such littering, just as we’d get penalized for going to Rushmore and firing off bottle rockets or blowing up some Black Cats. And, on top of everything else, there was a pretty clear link between the fireworks show and some elevated levels of a pollutant, perchlorate, found in water sources at the memorial.
Tupper did some fine reporting on the many issues related to the fireworks display, including this piece from back in February.
So, it’s serious stuff, not to be casually dismissed or casually resumed. At least not by anyone informed on the issues.
Julie Smoragiewicz doesn’t dismiss the concerns with fireworks. But she also understands the tourism value of the fireworks display and of a high-profile presidential visit. She just wants more to be known and shared and considered and discussed, in public.
Maggie Seidel said more will be coming, probably this week. It can’t be too soon, Smoragiewicz said. And she said it convincingly enough that I probably would have written this blog story anyway, even without the yaks.
But who can turn down a yaks angle, and a yaks visit? Not me. So soon I was nosing around Yak Ridge, checking out the yaks.
There are four of them there these days, which is a little low from the six or so Smoragiewicz likes to have around. They started the small herd with a bull from Hay Springs Yaks on Little Bordeaux Creek in the Pine Ridge formation down near Chadron, one of the nation’s largest yak ranches. The original female came from a breeder near Missoula, Montana.
No high-altitude shortness of breath among the yak pack
And the yaks ancestry? It’s Himalayan. Which means the yaks at Yak Ridge have some toughness in their DNA. With proportionally larger lungs and heart than cattle, yaks make more efficient use of available oxygen, which is one of the many reasons they are valued pack animals in the Himalayans.
“They can take in more oxygen at higher elevation and withstand 20-below winters,” Smoragiewicz said. “They’re a really good match for the Black Hills.”
The domestic yak descended long ago from the larger wild yak, which can grow to more than 6 feet tall and weigh more than 2,000 pounds. The wild yak is extinct in much of its original range and drastically reduced in others. Once considered endangered by the International Union of Nature and Natural Resources, the wild yak has been upgraded to “vulnerable.”
Still, it’s in trouble. And commercial poaching remains its most dangerous threat.
The gentle-looking-but-well horned domestic yaks at Yak Ridge don’t have to worry much about human poachers. And Smoragiewicz says they’re pretty good at fending off wild predators. So, they lead a pretty safe, comfortable life in pleasant surroundings, communicating with other yaks and with people through a series of creatively expressed grunts.
Which makes their Latin name “grunting ox” even more delightfully appropriate.
“They communicate a lot with each other, and with you,” Smoragiewicz said. “They’re interested in people. And they definitely will demand scratches and treats.”
Each year, one or two of the yaks will end up at “freezer land,” a term Smoragiewicz uses to answer questions of visitors without getting too graphic.
“It’s for the kids,” she said. “Then we leave it up to the parents on how much to tell them after that.”
Yaks provide sweet meat that’s flavorful but not gamey and high in Omega 3. Their high-fat milk is good for cheeses and yogurt. And the high-quality fiber from their thick coats is warmer than regular wool and more breathable than cashmere.
They also have a great feed-to-weight-gain ratio and they produce smaller calves and fewer reproductive complications than cattle. And they’re just really cool to look at, which is what led me to make a personal visit to Yak Ridge rather than just have Smoragiewicz send me a picture or two from her smart phone.
And while I’m here, let’s talk about the kids
As long as I was there, I checked up on other family matters, including the progress of their sons, Tyler and Tony. That’s what we do in these parts, after all. We chat.
Tyler, 30, who swam competitively in college, is a Black Hills State University graduate in outdoor education who works in that essential job at Ellsworth Air Force Base. He interned in outdoor education at the Outdoor Campus West here in Rapid City, where he worked with my pal Keith Wintersteen, who died recently.
Jim Smoragiewicz knew and fished with Wintersteen, too, so the family shares my sense of loss. Small state. Shared connections.
Tony was a star runner and multiple state champion in high school in Rapid City before running cross country and track at the University of Michigan. Now 26 and competing internationally in the triathlon, he’s aiming for the next Olympics.
So, there was lots to discuss there at Yak Ridge. Mostly, though, it was about Mount Rushmore, fireworks, the president and yaks, which haven’t finished capturing my imagination.
“We’ve got babies due in a month,” Smoragiewicz said.
Dang, I think she has me again.
