Last Friday we finally attended the, much anticipated, 50th annual Buffalo Roundup in Custer State Park together with a record crowd of about 21,000 visitors (against last year's 14.000)!

We'd set out at 6 am, still dark, for the 2 hour drive down to Custer:

Half-way the sunrise colored the tops of the hills a bright orange:

 And on arrival at the Park, the morning fog still hung over the lakes:

We knew we were not going to be alone, and we weren't, so for a while we were all guided, bumper to bumper, to one of the two 'viewing areas' ....

.....  it took us about half an hour on a dusty (but good) dirt road to       arrive at the Northern viewing area ....

                           Like I said, us and 21.000 others!



While I staked out our spot, James got in line for a pancake and sausage breakfast, which was actually very nice :

On the hill opposite of us we could see all the people in the Southern viewing area, and the valley in between is where the buffalo were coming through on their way to the corrals to the right.

Around 9.30 the cowboys and back-up trucks left to go and find the herd, who slowly had been collected from all over the park and herded to a nearby area in the previous weeks.

About half an hour later we spotted them high up on the hills nearby to bring in a small group of stragglers to the big herd ...

A little while after that, it was around 10.30 by now, I spotted (with the maximum zoom from the camera) some activity in the hills in front of us, a dust cloud moving towards us ....

 And finally they emerged over the last low hills in front of us ....

Tatanka!!!!

 

It was an unbelievable sight, right out of 'Dances with wolves'! It gave me goose-bumps ...



The cowboys and girls did a nice job of driving them through the gates into the lower pasture ....

Everything looked to go smoothly and the majority of the herd moved neatly through the second pair of gates that led directly into the holding corals.
And that would have been it, if it weren't for the fact that a small group decided to turn around, somewhere in those pretty trees there in the middle of the picture, and started to run back at full speed!!!

And than the fun really started! Cowboys racing back and forth, cracking their whips, trucks trying to get ahead of the now 'stampeding' herd! 

                                     It was some spectacle!

They scared the heck out of 2 deer that were grazing in the meadow!

And just when everybody thought they were 'safe' and had them all going into the right direction again, .... they escaped again!

What a show!

 But finally they succeeded to get them all through the gates ...

We heard from many people around us, the ones that come almost every year, that they never had such a spectacular round-up before. 

Usually there's not much fuss, they show up, they run through the gate ... end of story. 

I guess we were lucky with this year's 'performance'!

The same went for the weather, it can be cold, wet, windy and nasty around this time of the year, but this time it was absolutely perfect!

When the dust had settled we took the shuttle bus over to the corrals and had some (appropriate) lunch, in the form off BBQ buffalo pull-apart on buns. Very tasty!

                   

At around 1 pm we walked over to the holding corrals and watched for a while how the buffalo were led into individual pens to be vaccinated and branded.

The herd is also culled, or reduced, to about 900 that will be released back onto the park to roam free for another year. The rest are sold at auction.

By the time we were ready to leave, the traffic had died down completely, the road between the two viewing areas was re-opened, and we had an easy exit, via a short dirt road, to Highway 79. 

But instead of going North, back home, we went South, to Hot Springs, because we weren't done for the day yet!

We'd made a tentative Tee-time at the Southern Hills Golf Club for 3 pm, not knowing if we could get out of the park in a decent time , but we made it with time to spare!

We'd heard it was a beautiful course and were not disappointed!

I especially liked it because it is a little bit shorter (I'm not a long hitter).

 

Lots of elevated tees give you beautiful panorama views of the surrounding area.

                      

This deer was totally NOT impressed by our play. I wasn't either .... but we had fun, and that's all that matters.
 
All in all, a beautiful, exciting, fun and very interesting day, I'd say.
About as good as they come!