The Elk Mountains are a small subrange at the Western edge of the Southern Black Hills and our great state of South Dakota.
Traveling West on HWY 16, past Jewel Cave National Monument, the topography gradually settles down into the red racetrack that rings the Black Hills. The Elks then rise somewhat inconspicuously like a geologic suburb — a mountain Cicero minus the Italian Beef stands. Their eastern ascent is generally sharper than their Western plunge, through a series of canyons onto the prairie of Eastern Wyoming, but gentler than the soaring granite peaks of the Central Hills.
With their brown, treeless expanses, climbing Elk Mountains peaks almost feels like traversing the torso of a large, supine elk. There's not much need for hiking trails, and in any case there are none.
Fires have maintained the wide open. The scars are everywhere, and the fragility of the deadfall underfoot betrays their age. The openness has encouraged the successful reintroduction of a bighorn sheep herd, and provides an interesting contrast to more heavily-forested sections. Your SDPB Outdoors correspondent wasn't fortunate enough to spot any bighorns on a recent foray, though there was evidence of their presence. Mule deer abounded, and several elk were spotted.
The Elk Mountain Lookout Tower is the highest point in the subrange, and accessible by car in the summer months. The most impressive views are out onto Wyoming's sage brush steppe. One can also spot the town of Edgemont. Edward Abbey, who was a better nature writer than your correspondent, would have despaired at the site of Edgemont, and at human endeavor in general, from this vantage.
Perhaps because I'm the lesser writer, my feelings was different. In this business, we generally hock our nature stories as heroic exercises in creating awareness. We take the pictures or video, or supply the pretty words that will inspire you to want to protect these places.
The emphasis on awareness as the key to their protection highlights our own importance as purveyors of that awareness. We talk about awareness so much that people may be more aware of awareness itself, than the things that they should be aware of. Awareness can be quite lucrative, or not, but certainly it must be very important, as we are all reminded daily by raisers of awareness. By way of contrast, I have cousins that are locally famous for raising hell, but am unaware of any person who raises potatoes, despite fries being universally deemed as delicious.
From my perch on Elk Mountain, hyper-aware of my solemn duty to raise awareness, seeing evidence of people involved in less awareness-inducing endeavors, I was unaware what exactly they might be doing. Possibly they were pickling eggs, or harvesting the eggs, or the dill and coriander required to pickle them, or fermenting the vinegar. Perhaps they were planting rows of cucumber, intermingled with quinoa and kohlrabi.
Was it possible that their pursuits, in these times or any, were as integral to the preservation of these Elk Mountains as my own evocation of awareness? Pangs of realization emerged. Without their egg-pickling, or jerky-making or whatever it was, without the harvesting and processing and distribution of the food supply, would I be forced, out of season, to hunt these beautiful animals — that frolicked here unhunted — and carry the bloody carcass back to my hungry babes? Without people in places like Edgemont, or even Dewey, doing the things they do, would the lights go on? Would smoothies be made smooth? Would people have to scour Elk Mountain for firewood or edible plants, or elk?
Surely, I protested, no meat can be as substantial as awareness! No grain can match the intellectual caloric content I harvest, against the the wind and weather of indifference, from the seeds of ideas sewn in the parched gumbo soil of unawareness!
But I wondered. I wondered as I walked up Wildcat Peak, and stood up on a rock at its highest point and gazed Northward at another nearby peak.
That peak was bald, and lower slung then peaks on either side — more a butte than a mountain — gently undulant, unfussily boulder-adorned, both elegant and utterly conventional among its environs, and unnamed like the strivers in this story.