The Black Hills

When I left off last email, we had just wrapped up our night shooting in the Badlands. Next up: the Black Hills, and the part of the trip where my rusty planning skills really got put to the test.

Our first stop was Sylvan Lake. We arrived in the dark, as usual (not exactly ideal for these trips, where being able to scout in daylight makes a huge difference). While we waited out the moon in the parking lot, the three of us had a wonderful time chatting over dinner in the van. I made us a dinner of dumplings and salad (I’m the trip chef, let’s be real).

Then we looked outside and the sky was completely clouded out.

Old me would have been tempted to just call it, find a camping spot, and rest up for the night.
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Instead we figured, hey, we’re already here… let’s explore! So we took a little hike around the lake and found the spot I had been imagining the composition from, and… clouds. But every now and then a gap would open up, and we’d catch the most incredible sea of stars shining through. Eventually one of those gaps held long enough for me to grab a quick shot with my 14mm. Nothing fancy, definitely not “my greatest shot yet,” but better than zero.

From there we headed down the Needles Highway just to explore. If you’ve never heard of this road, it winds through a forest of granite spires that shoot straight up out of the hills, and it’s full of tunnels that were blasted through the rock a hundred years ago. And when I say tunnels, I mean TIGHT tunnels. Our camper van barely squeezed through the famous Needles Eye Tunnel. Matt’s camper didn’t fit at all, so he parked his whole setup at the pullout before the tunnel and hopped in with us.

(Remember that pullout, it becomes important later.)

Further down the road I finally spotted a south-facing view with a decent composition, so I set up the Nikon to timelapse on the tracker, hiked up the hillside overlooking the pullout, and shot a mosaic with the Sony. Again, not the most amazing shot ever, but better than the lake shot, and this time with the Milky Way core in frame.

The next day we said goodbye to Arne, who had to leave the trip early for a funeral. I was really grateful he made the trip despite such a tough scheduling conflict, and I know he was glad he did too. We always have a fantastic time together, and this was no exception!

After dropping him off in Rapid City, Matt and I hit reset: laundry, errands, and a gourmet taco night in a Walmart parking lot.
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Then we headed back into the hills to find a spot to camp, and this is where things got interesting.

The entire sky was clouded over and it was pouring rain, so the night was PITCH black. The camping spot we had scoped out as our winner turned out to be up a dirt road that the rain had turned to pure mud, and with Matt towing his camper and me in the van, we started sliding out almost immediately. We decided to abandon that spot and had to scramble to find another one, which was no easy feat with two large vehicles, zero visibility, and rain hammering down.

We couldn’t shoot a single frame that night, and yet, it was still one of my favorite nights of the whole trip.

There was a funny duality to that night. On one hand, it was incredibly peaceful out there, just us in a wilderness meadow with the rain drumming on the roof. On the other hand, thoughts of how creepy it was kept slipping into my mind. With the clouds blocking out every bit of starlight, we couldn’t see a single thing outside the van, and the rain covered up any sound beyond our walls. Anything could have been standing ten feet away and we’d never know. I can’t lie, if I had been alone I would have found that pretty eerie, but since Matt was there it was chill!
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At some point Matt fired up his Starlink and we got a gaming session going, which to me was just hilarious. I was playing the same first-person shooter I play at home, except from the middle of a pitch-black forest in the Black Hills, and none of my opponents had any idea.

The next morning was a slow one: pancakes, eggs, and bacon, with music playing in our own private meadow.

I hit start on the timelapse just before sunset. I’d promised the folks at Vanna an epic timelapse from this trip, so this one needed to work: the camera would have to run untouched until sunrise.

Then we drove off to what I thought would be the night’s main event, a spot called Breezy Point Picnic Area. From the few photos I could find online, I was convinced the lookout faced south over the jagged rocks, perfect for the Milky Way. We arrived around sunset and I realized I had made a big mistake. Every one of the good views faced north or west, completely useless for a Milky Way alignment this time of year. We scrambled up to the highest point of the lookout anyway and got some amazing sunset shots (and a healthy dose of vertigo).

I have to be honest with you about where my head was at this point... We hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It was my last full night in the Black Hills, the FOMO was washing over me, and I was down on myself in a way that felt very familiar. I was thinking, "there’s no way I’m going to find an iconic composition on the fly, in the dark, in a place I’ve never properly scouted." This was exactly the spiral I had promised myself I wouldn’t fall into on this trip.

The best plan I could come up with was to drive the Needles Highway, which was about 20 minutes away, and just visually scout for compositions.

We pulled off at the Needles Eye Tunnel, the same pullout where Matt’s camper hadn’t fit two nights earlier. It was the end of blue hour, the moon lending just enough light to see the landscape, and this place is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been: granite spires packed tight, sticking straight up into the sky all around us. We started scrambling up the hillside beside the road, basically climbing the side of the mountain the road was cut into. Matt seemed a little uncertain about how far up we kept going, but for some reason I had this feeling that I was right on the cusp of finding what I was looking for.

And then we found it. A spire with a crack between it and its neighbor that looked easy enough to free climb. It wasn’t particularly tall, maybe 10 to 15 feet, but up top there was a ledge with about 9 inches of standing room, and you could wedge yourself against the spire behind you in a way that felt secure. The drop on the far side down the hillside was more like 30+ feet, which in the dark was… a little sketchy. But from up there, the view was unreal. The composition almost looked like it was shot from a drone: spires stacked on spires, the road threading between them below, and later that night, around 2 or 3am, the Milky Way core would line up right above it all.

We climbed down, drove the rest of the road checking other options, and ultimately decided the spire was the spot. That left about four hours to kill, so we just hung out and talked, and eventually had dinner around 11pm (totally normal dinner time when you’re going to bed at 5am and waking up at noon). No van kitchen this time since we’d left it at camp running the timelapse, so we made do with a camping stove: boiled hot dogs and a bag salad. Boy dinner, once again 😂. And you know what? Eating a warm meal outside in 30 degree air, no wind for once, just “regular cold,” was actually pretty amazing.

For the climb, I set up my full camera rig on the tracker and tripod at the bottom so I wouldn’t have to fiddle with anything up top and risk dropping something into the void. Climbing up one-handed was certainly interesting, but we took our time and made it without incident. And then something happened that I love about this craft: the moment I started shooting, every sensation of cold and tiredness just disappeared. I was completely locked in. I shot a 24mm panorama and a 14mm version just to have options.

Here’s the result:

Something that really excites me is getting shots that haven’t been done before. In a place so heavily photographed, it feels like a difficult assignment, but here it really worked out and that’s what made me happiest about this image. The composition is not perfect by any means, but it is unique and was so fun to shoot, I feel incredibly satisfied with it. Plus, shooting from up on that ledge was sort of the peak experience of astrophotography for me, it was just so cool being up there in the dark!

(Look closely at the road between the spires and you might spot Matt’s Jeep 👀)

We rolled back into camp around 5am, right as blue hour was starting, and I rushed over to check on the timelapse. Still running! Huge relief. When I reviewed it later I discovered I had ever-so-slightly bumped the focus at some point, and I’ll admit the old me would have filed the whole thing under “failure.” It’s still a beautiful timelapse. Sometimes good is good enough, and learning to accept that was kind of the whole point of this trip.

The next morning brought the biggest decision of the trip. It was my second-to-last day, and I had two options: play it safe by splitting the long drive home over two days, which meant leaving Matt that morning and shooting alone somewhere forgettable along the route… or full send it to Wyoming with him for one last night, at a location I have dreamed about shooting for years, and then drive the entire way home in one shot.

You can probably guess what I chose. More on that in the next email 😁.

Thanks for reading,

Mike

P.S. I will be doing Astro Calendars again this year, so keep an eye out for an announcement about that next email!