Lights and Shadows Among the PinesCanedy Photo
We start the trip with an upward climb of six and a half miles. This has a tendency somehow to warm up the motor a bit. Now we follow a mountain top trail. The scenery is beautiful as we skim along over good roads with gentle grades. In places the trees are thick, in other places thin. There are pines, cottonwood, aspen, spruce, and others. In places forest fires have left a devastated appearance. These sights leave with one a feeling of sadness, that carelessness and destruction must claim these great potentialities of usefulness and beauty. They leave with us a deeper resolve to “Put out campfires before leaving them.”
It is thirty-one miles to Pactola on Rapid Creek. Just after we cross the creek and before crossing the railroad we turn to the right, following the creek, and drive up to Silver City. As near as we can find out they do not mine silver here. The place is a group of log cabins and is used for a summer resort. It is a beautiful little place.
A Log CabinCanedy Photo
Going up the creek we take a winding road, almost a path. Along this road are many church and other camps. We come to Camp Wanzer a few miles beyond Silver City in Bear Canyon.
Camp Wanzer is not a tuberculosis camp. It is a camp for building up physically run-down children. No one with tuberculosis or other communicable disease is admitted. The plan is to have the children live out here away from vices and irregularities of city life, where proper hours, food, exercise and supervision may build up their run-down bodies. The records show remarkable results. Children are required to rise at a certain time, observe exercise periods, rest periods, to eat wholesome meals at regular times and to sleep enough each night. They have a nice swimming hole, too. The children enjoy the vacation. They are kept for three to six weeks, and in practically every case leave there stronger and happier than when they came. A person is highly impressed with what this camp means to these children. There were fifty-five there in 1928. Children come from all parts of the state. Parents pay for it where they can and the Christmas seals sale pays for the rest. After seeing where our Christmas seal proceeds go we are ever so much more willing and even anxious to contribute to the fund.
We again follow a beautiful mountain stream, Spring Creek, through Sheridan and down to Hill City. Along the road we find some real rock cliffs running up several hundred feet and we can here see the plan of the rock layers, thrown in, tilted on edge, the formation which is general throughout the Black Hills. At Sheridan there is a good looking tourist camp, including cabins.