The George S. Mickelson Trail is a 108 mile gravel rail trail that runs south from Deadwood, SD in the Black Hills to Edgemont on the prairie. It follows the bed of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad which operated as recently as 1986. As with all rail trails the grades are gentle making for relatively easy cycling.
On a crisp, clear September morning my wife and I left our AirBnB on Main Street in Deadwood and made our way to the trailhead where the old rail yard used to be. I was on my regular bike and my wife on her e-bike, which allows her to keep up with me on the flats and beat me on the climbs, which is a real ego booster for her. Sprinting across the highway to beat the changing light I nearly got nailed by a car turning left. “Cocksucker!”, we both yelled at each other in true Deadwood fashion before carrying on. At the trailhead we paid our $5/person fee at the kiosk and headed out and up the grade.
On the edge of town the trail diverged from the main highway and wound its way up a secluded canyon. High on the hill above us was the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Housed in an old gold mine, it is where “scientists study mysterious particles like neutrinos and dark matter deep underground where a mile of rock shields experiments from cosmic radiation that constantly bombards Earth.” I don’t really understand it, but it sound cool and sciency.
The trail rejoined the highway before making a sharp, steep turn, which leads me to believe the trail deviates slightly from the rail bed here, but soon rejoins it to continue climbing gently. After a little more climbing the road mostly flattens out for a few miles. At a gate we got stopped by volunteers checking our permits. I suppose the volunteers could have been roadside bandits, but they had IDs and clipboards, so I’ll assume they were official. Good thing we decided to be good citizens and purchase our trail permits at the trailhead. It’s kind of a pain in the butt, but someone needs to pay for the upkeep of the trail, the tunnels and the bridges, and it might as well be the people who use them.
After a short downhill we rolled into Englewood which at one time I believe was the junction of the railroad headed south and a railroad that headed east. It was a large enough settlement to support a post office until 1943, but there is not much there today except a few scattered cabins visible from the trail. It’s fascinating to think about what it must have looked like back in the day when it was populated. In fact, looking at a map of the Black Hills you can see all kinds of townsites where nothing is left.
Leaving Englewood we started up another climb. I was hoping to at least get to the first of four tunnels on the trail, but it turns out that was another 10 miles away. I would have done it if I was on my own, but my wife doesn’t have the patience for that sort of thing, and if she ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. So before long we turned around and headed back the way we came.
Close to town where the trail rejoined the highway we veered left onto a spur trail that took us up to the town of Lead, pronounced like the verb not the metal. Over the top we coasted down the steep hill through town toward the edge of the massive open pit Homestake Gold Mine. At the visitors center you can hit golf balls into the pit, but we decided to pass on that. Despite being about three times larger than Deadwood, Lead is pretty dead, pronounced like the adjective not the misspelled noun.
Back on the road we continued down the hill to rejoin the highway at the edge of Deadwood. We decided to take a detour and ride up to the cemetery on Mount Moriah where Wild Bill, Calamity Jane and Seth Bullock are buried. The road up to the cemetery is extremely steep, over 25% grade in spots. Even though my wife had an e-bike she had to get off and walk, but I kept pedaling. By the time I got to the top I felt like Kristi Noem’s dog. I wondered if they would need to prepare a plot for me, but I was fortified by the immortal words of the famous Stoic, Al Swearingen: “Pain or damage don’t end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man… and give some back.”
So inspired I pulled myself up and went into the gift shop. We bought some ice cream and started chatting with an old timer who was working behind the counter. I mentioned to him that I had been to Deadwood in the early 90s and much had changed. He said that when the mine in Lead shut down the town emptied out almost overnight. To boost the economy South Dakota legalized gambling in Deadwood. Kevin Costner had a plan to bring a train from Rapid City so people could gamble at his casino, but a landowner whose land the track crossed objected, so the idea died and Costner sold his casino. Nevertheless the town continued to come back based on tourism. I must admit that I kind of enjoyed the town more in the 90s when it felt like a ghost town and I could play $2 blackjack for hours with a stake of just $20 at Costner’s casino. But I don’t have to make a living there, so if cheesy tourist stuff is what they need to survive, who am I to judge?
The old timer’s chronology is at odds with Wikipedia, however. The town’s population peaked in 1940 and lost 20% of its people by 1950, probably due to WW2. It lost another 20% in the 1960s when the interstate bypassed Deadwood. It continued to decline after the Feds raided the three remaining brothels in 1980. Gambling was legalized in Deadwood in 1989 and the mine didn’t shut down until 2001. By then the population had already declined by about 65% from its peak. Whatever the story may be, it’s safe to say the town has had its ups and downs. Anyway, back to the ride.
After finishing our ice creams we locked up our bikes and bought our tickets to the cemetery. First stop was the graves of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. I assume this is the true location of their graves, but they appear to have been gussied up for the hoopleheads. Much further up the hill with a commanding view of the town is the grave of Seth Bullock who was sheriff in Deadwood’s wild early days.
Leaving the cemetery we found a more gentle route downhill and back into town toward our AirBnB for some needed rest. One of these days when I have more time on my hands I hope to ride the entire trail and spend more time exploring the Black Hills. It’s a surprisingly beautiful area with plenty to explore.
someone needs to pay for the upkeep of the trail, the tunnels and the bridges, and it might as well be the people who use them.
You’ll never get elected on that platform.
I got my fill of tourist traps being just down the road from Lake George Village (NY) in high school.
I grew up at the NJ seashore. I can tell you all about tourists and tourist driven businesses.
Yeah, grew up on the Cali coast. We have special names for them…
Thanks! Fun read.
Indeed. I enjoy vicarious tourism, and these pieces hit the spot. Almost makes me want to get on a bike again after 30 or so years. Almost.
Dammit – I have plenty more vicarious touristy works to write but I never know where to start or what you guys want most. Will be harder to write away, these days. Seems like I may have lost all of my pics from back then, though I’m hopeful (yet not optimistic) I can get it all back. I’d be very upset if I can’t.
I need an editor to organize my thoughts. Pretty much tell me what y’all would like to hear about, and perhaps why and what interests you the most, and I can still make it work. Hard to juggle all my travels and experiences and *decide* upon an Idea to Focus Pocus on.
Next contribution I’ve mostly written was gonna include pics from Hong Kong and Laos, just to add art to a piece that’s really about being That Type of person with several careers and transitions instead of a linear path like my bro (and others). I didn’t copy them into the doc so those crowd-pleasers are in the ether.
I want to add to the Glibs’ article-coffers, but so many to choose from. (I know.)
I would have done it if I was on my own, but my wife doesn’t have the patience for that sort of thing,
Does she have range anxiety?
She is riding an e-bike!
OT – Since I have a 3080 GPU and 32gb of memory I decided to give this a shot. It’s truly bizarre.
https://github.com/lllyasviel/FramePack?tab=readme-ov-file
Take a look at some of the still images and the predicted videos. The one with the anime figure (Hatusne Miku) is incredibly creepy.
🤔
I was surprised it use all the PC memory in addition to the video memory. It doesn’t do much with the CPU.
What kind of virus are you trying to spread?
The instructions provided do not work, and I have not yet figured out how to correct them
Worked for me.
Extract the 7z folder. Run update. Run the run.bat. It downloads something like 10gb of files at that point.
I did that – it downloads Nothing, but throws an error about not finding the packages.
Possibly whatever external site(s) it is pulling files from is locked down on your end?
I know you have things rather clamped down.
It appears that it doesn’t play nice with stablediffusion, who uses similar packages. It sees the older versions I have installed for the stable diffusion install, assumes they are the ones it uses, then errors when its function calls fail.
Who would have thought that someone who might want to try this also has other LLM image generation modules installed
Great, the update for this thing broke my stablediffusion installe
Seems par for the course on anything like this. Good luck!
I got StableDiffusion back into a running state.
It just didn’t want to import the Ultralytics module used by the facedetailer node.
Oh fer fuck’s sake.
Turns out if I don’t opt to run the bat file from a command prompt and instead just double click it does use its own environment and doesn’t step on my Stablediffusion stuff at all.
Dammit, Windows, Be consistant!
I have it running to generate a video from one of the StableDiffusion test images I generated. I’ll see what it pops out after I run some errands.
That should be scary.
Destruction and decay
At 07.39 GMT on 7 December 2022 – 50 years later to the minute since the original was taken – a new “Blue Marble” was captured by a satellite orbiting a million miles away. This time, a set of 12 images taken 15 minutes apart, reveal noticeable changes to our planet’s surface, the result of 50 years of global warming.
In the 50 years that separates these two snapshots in time, one of the most striking differences is the visible reduction in the size of the Antarctic ice sheet. “You can see the shrinking cryosphere – the shrinking ice sheet and the loss of the snow,” says Pepin says. This, he says, is a major indicator of climate change.
The Sahara Desert has also grown while the rainforest “is retreating further south”, he adds. Research has shown that tree cover in the vast Sahel region that borders the Sahara Desert has been in significant decline. “The dominant thing that you can see on the [new] image is deforestation and the loss of vegetation”, as the Earth’s land cover switches from greenery to desert.
Mother Earth is dying. Who will save her?
Hopefuĺly not humans, we would fuck up a wet dream,
/Silurians Forever!
Mother Earth is Pregnant, for the very last time.
‘Yall have knocked her up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBNJ52YSKww
I love that song!
“Free your mind, and your ass will follow.”
The Gods are angry. Doom approaches. Sacrifices must be made.
USAID is not still giving money to these lying fucks, are they?
The Hulu show “Dying for Sex” strikes me as both incredibly sad and somehow emblematic of the narcissism of our times.
https://archive.is/kxVyE
Titty Tuesday.
The Hulu show “Dying for Sex”
A documentary about the black widow spider?
Based on a true story podcast in which a woman diagnosed with stage IV metastatic cancer decides to dump her husband to sleep around until she dies.
What an awful person.
Did she legally divorce him, or can he at least get the royalties of his documented humiliation once she kicks?
Dunno, but she’s already dead.
They are doing it because they want their due process to be so long and complicated that it will be impossible to deport any substantial numbers of illegals, whom they are counting on for votes in the future.
The appropriate level of due process is to verify that the potential deportee is not either a citizen or legal permanant reisdent, at which point they should be sent packing.
You can appeal from your home country. The appeals will all be denied.
That’s where I am, Jaime. Don’t ever assume a Democrat is working in good faith. They love the law as long as it serves their needs, and if it doesn’t, it can be changed or flat our ignored. They will attempt to achieve their goals by any means possible, and in this case the goal is radically changing the electorate.
“achieve their goals by any means possible”
I mean, they’ve not only demonstrating that through their actions but flat out advertising their intentions since at least Obama.
Baffling
More worrisome is possible higher interest rates on the ballooning U.S. federal debt, which is already at a risky 120 percent of U.S. annual economic output.
“Most countries with that debt to GDP would cause a major crisis and the only reason we get away with it is that the world needs dollars to trade with,” says Benn Steil, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations. ”At some point people are going to look seriously at alternatives to the dollar. ”
And Congress has once again shown no inclination to do anything but kick that can down the road.
Trump’s tariffs are obviously the problem.
Congress has done absolutely jack and shit. Hell, they knew they had majorities months ago and could have started writing legislation. No wonder Trump is ruling by executive order. It’s all he has.
One of these days when I have more time on my hands I hope to ride the entire trail and spend more time exploring the Black Hills. It’s a surprisingly beautiful area with plenty to explore.
Definitely go back. The Black Hills are great.
Based on a true story podcast in which a woman diagnosed with stage IV metastatic cancer decides to dump her husband to sleep around until she dies.
Less harmful to other people than going on a debt fueled spending binge on the way out.
… other than possibly spreading STDs from partner to partner. 🙄
Someone asked me last night why the progs are so dead set on open borders. My answer: “Because by-and-large we are a culture that says “You dont own me” and leftists cannot abide that. They are trying to replace us. ”
That is it in a nutshell. As a simple matter of survival we are going to have to put all of these people out one way or another.
That’s a good way to frame it. The Dems are now the party of the elites, and the poor/immigrants dependent on those elites for everything. The rest of the “mouth breathers in flyover country” are too independent and need to go away.
They require a permanent serf underclass to act as clients. This provides them with votes as well as the warm fuzzies of moral superiority for “helping them”.
What’s more puzzling to me is why they’re fighting Trump’s deportations tooth and nail right now. They just lost a big election largely on a referendum on open borders. If they were more strategically savvy, they’d keep their mouths shut for now, or even lie through their teeth about wanting secure borders, wait for their turn back in power and then start importing illegals in a less chaotic fashion than before. Indeed, I think the ancien régime would be smart enough to do just that, but they’ve let the far left loonies off the leash and now the inmates are running the asylum. Lobbying to bring deported gangbangers and criminals back is not popular with anyone outside of the faculty lounge.
The loonies are in charge, and nobody in the Democrat party has either the inclination or the skill to engage in politics. They have zero interest in how anything looks to 75% of the country. Their only hope right now is that the pendulum naturally swings back on its own.
“The loonies are in charge”
You could just stop right there.
Well, except for that Crockett creature. She explained very carefully just the other day that breaking the law is not a crime. At least they have her.
Ummmmm… no shit?
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/straight-men-love-boobs-boffins-34951239
Only soyboy academic weenies and angry feminazi communists would believe otherwise.
Well Q, they are experts. It says so right there in the article.
I wonder who paid for that study.
Top. Men.
So, what do you do for a living, professor?
I have been asking lately what productive people will do when AI and robotics makes us all unemployable. What will these worthless sacks do? Or will we all become them?
Someone asked me last night why the progs are so dead set on open borders. My answer: “Because by-and-large we are a culture that says “You dont own me” and leftists cannot abide that. They are trying to replace us. ”
Me, talking to somebody about the vax four or five years ago: The bottom line is I am not Joe Biden’s chattel fucking property.
A bunch of self-appointed ‘elite’ who are really just cockroaches with room temperature IQ’s and a feral talent for ladder climbing have convinced themselves otherwise.
I wonder who paid for that study.
Frederick’s of Hollywood?
We can not have the US funding drug development for the rest of the first world.
-Government health officials told source they were exploring an international reference pricing policy
-U.S. pays nearly three times more than other developed countries for drugs
-The policy is more concerning to the pharmaceuticals industry than tariffs, sources say
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/trump-looking-cutting-us-drug-prices-international-levels-sources-say-2025-04-22/
I rarely hear anyone mention that most other countries heavily subsidize their drugs. I have no doubt that we overpay here but others touting their own cheap drugs are still paying for them but that is hidden from them. Then tariffs. Then cost spreading where Americans are usually expected to pay for everyone else. Plus we are paying the tab for the development and approval process. Plus….plus…plus. The water is so muddy here it is probably nearly impossible to untangle the problem. Like most of what the USGov has built it can only probably be fixed by shitcanning the whole thing and starting over from scratch.
Let them be reimported into the US. It would quickly stop a good chunk of the shenanigans.
The drug companies price to a global ROE for a given drug. Essentially France says it will only pay X and BigPharma either says yes or no. The US is the country that they plug the cost into to see if the price and quantity they will sell justifies.
I went to school with somebody in the 1990s that created the Excel models that did the global pricing. I’m sure today it is much more sophisticated.
On topic: One day I might tell my ‘Buffalo Bill’ story. Part true, part speculation.
“We decided to take a detour and ride up to the cemetery on Mount Moriah where Wild Bill, Calamity Jane and Seth Bullock are buried.”
Uh. Were I also there, in no way would I consider that a “detour,” but a pretty purposeful destination. (Maybe ‘physically’ a detour off the route, sure. But like shortcuts, they’re “*supposed to be hard! Otherwise it would just be The Way!)
Thanks for these. The whole Deadwood-region of the US is one I haven’t yet explored and I’d really like to. Particularly cuz I haven’t been before. I also haven’t watched Deadwood yet, which is apparently a loud omission in my repertoire, especially as it seems to fit right into the ‘This shit was made for *you*’ list. I may get on that somehow.