Crooks Tower / Belle Fourche Reservoir

Hiking to Crooks Tower in the Black Hills | Camping at the Belle Fourche Reservoir | Driving from South Dakota to Iowa | July 2025

When we woke up this morning, we knew it was time to leave the Black Hills. Not just because our schedule required us to start heading East soon, but also because we were tired of all the overnight storms that had been keeping us up. We were already struggling to sleep because of our grief, but the constant pounding of hail and heavy raindrops on our roof were making sleep impossible. Additionally, we were having an issue with moths for almost our entire time in the mountains. They weren’t actually nesting inside the van – and we didn’t have anything for them to feed on/nest in inside – they were just hanging out inside the cracks in our doors during the day, and a few would get in the van by night. It was annoying, and after fighting with them for a week we decided we just needed to get out of their ‘home.’

We decided to go for one last short hike that morning, so we prepared the van and navigated to the trail. The road getting there turned out to be the roughest we had encountered yet during our time in the hills, probably because this was predominantly an ATV area so there were many ruts and puddles in the road. We ended up finding a safe place to pull over about a mile from the peak and just walked the rest of the way. It wasn’t so much of a trail as it was an ATV road getting to the peak, but at least the only group of riders we saw were just at a road junction and not at our end destination. We had to get by some large puddles and navigate around fallen trees, but the hike wasn’t too hard and yielded some decent views of the surrounding Black Hills. This point is called Crook’s Tower, and while it isn’t prominent enough for Curtis’ list, it is a county high point, so it kinda counts towards something.

With that, we had officially wrapped up our hiking trip to the Black Hills, and we began driving North towards Belle Fourche. We stopped at a Taco John’s for lunch and to avoid being outside during the hottest point of the day, then drove East towards our intended camping area for the night, Belle Fourche Reservoir. When driving to the reservoir, there is a point where you can either drive straight to the main campground and pay $30/night to have electric hookups, or you can turn left and find a free lakeside spot along other gravel roads — guess which one we chose! We ended up in a beautiful, serene spot right on the water, with views of the Black Hills in the distance, where we watched more intense storm clouds pass overhead there and were very glad to not be participants in that round of storms. Instead, we had clear skies and a quiet night at last.

The next morning, Curtis had a meeting so we stayed put for a few hours until that wrapped up. We then began our unnecessarily long drive across South Dakota — not that driving East across SD was unnecessary, but that we made it much longer than it had to be by taking two lane highways the whole way. But it was really a pleasant drive and we got a lot of counties along the way, leaving us now with only 4 unvisited counties in the state!

We ended up staying in a park in Gettysburg, SD that allowed free overnight camping. Along with a free spot, it also offered free hot showers which we took full advantage of, and had a little free library with some surprisingly good finds! The park was pretty busy that evening with possibly the entire county turning out for little league baseball games, so we went for a long walk around the park and then the town itself until the noise died down.

The next day, we continued our county quest across East-central SD, which took us East on US-212 all the way to Watertown, SD. We stopped to run some errands there, including getting free frozen custard from Culver’s and taking it to a pretty park right next to the interstate. From there, we took I-29 South to Brookings, then went East on US-14 into Minnesota. We had intended on staying at a waterfront spot in Lake Benton, but when we arrived we didn’t like the vibe there, so we continued heading East and got some new MN counties.

While we drove, I searched for places where we could stay for free overnight, which were becoming few and far between. Eventually we decided on a rest area off of MN-30 just East of St. James. In an effort to not spend more time there than we needed to, I searched for other attractions on the way and directed Curtis to Red Rock Falls County Park just a mile East of US-71. As the name implies, the park is home to a beautiful waterfall surrounded by red rocks, which require minimal walking to get to. We wandered around on the rocks and enjoyed the falls from different vantage points, then I made dinner and we ate at the pavilion here. While we were hanging out, a man and his granddaughter came by and said hi, and the man told us that his family had once owned this land and used it for cattle grazing before giving it to the county. He said that there haven’t ever been any injuries or fatalities from people swimming here, but one drunk guy once got injured because he tried to climb up the rock wall. Then he went on his way, and we finished dinner, cleaned up, and continued on to our rest stop. The highway wasn’t too busy so we had a mostly quiet night here.

The next morning, we got up early and drove through some rain to grab one more county that was making a hole in our map, then began our drive South into Iowa. The rain eventually cleared and we had an uneventful drive. Our biggest mistake was driving through Ames, on the day that marked 2 weeks since we were last there…yeah, we were a mess.

It so happened that my mom was visiting my Nanna that day at her farm in central IA, and my uncle from Michigan was also there, so we decided to stop by and see everyone. It was great to catch up, be distracted from our feelings for a while, and see how well the farm is doing this year with all the rain that’s fallen. We ended up spending the night there (but inside the van, because it’s actually cooler in there than it was in the non-air conditioned upstairs of the farm house) and then finished the drive to my parent’s house the next day.