We woke up early since we knew it would be a long ride to our planned destination: Crazy Horse. We had some oatmeal and our favorite bread toasted with honey for breakfast. We were on the road by a little after 9 heading towards Custer Park again. Within about a mile of being in the park, we saw our fist buffalo for the day. There were a few more buffalo standing in front of the visitor center when we rode by as well. Soon enough we reached the needles highway where we turned to begin to head north. The beginning of the road was beautiful because there were trees all over the the road was again pretty curvy. I was feeling exhausted this morning and my legs were pretty sore from all the climbing we did yesterday so I decided to try some of a 5hr energy that John gave us. For some reason it made me feel really weird; my arms felt heavy, I was really warm and I felt a tad bit dizzy. This slowed us down a little but, luckily that feeling wore off after a couple hours of climbing. For most of the morning, we felt like we weren't going to make it home before dark because we were going pretty slow (we didn't realize how much we were actually climbing I guess). I don't think we had any idea what was in store for us as we were riding down the needles highway; we knew there were rock formations but had no idea it would be so amazing to ride through. The rock formations were incredible and the road going through them was another amazing road to ride on. At one point we even saw a guardrail way up in the rock formations so we knew we would be doing a lot of switchbacks soon. The ride was just so incredible that it's hard to describe, but I took a ton of pictures because of that. When we reached the "needle's eye" we rode through the most amazing tunnel I had ever ridden through. It was about 8 feet wide and 12 feet high and when you looked up you could see the sunlight through the crack in the stone. As we continued on, we came across Sylvan Lake which was really pretty. We rode back down for quite a while before reaching the turn to go to Crazy Horse, which of course we uphill again. Since we had been climbing almost the entire day thus far we were SO hungry by the time we made it to Crazy Horse, however we decided that we would wait until we made it to Custer to eat. We walked around the Native American museum, watched the 20 minute video on the monument and took a little time to look at all the pictures of how it has progressed over the years. I didn't realize how incredibly huge this monument really was. After seeing Crazy Horse, we luckily had a mostly downhill ride into Custer, where we went to Subway (even though we wanted to go to the pizza restaurant, but it was closed for the season, just like most of the other things in this area at this time of year). We usually split a sub and are content, but we were both so hungry that we decided to each get a foot long. After a yummy "lunch" around 5pm, we headed back towards the campground. Again, we rode through Custer Park. While riding we saw Rob, a member of the bicycle club, riding up towards Coolidge Mtn. We also saw a small group of mountain sheep in the park. We originally thought they were deer, except they didn't move when they saw us coming, instead, they just stood there in the middle of the road. We saw more turkeys, deer, buffalo, and more sheep as we continued to ride through the park. The ride home took about an hour and 45 minutes, where the ride to Crazy Horse took us over 5 hours because of all of the climbing. We were surprised to see a sign that said we were at an elevation of over 5,000 feet. Any other time we had climbed to an elevation that high or higher we had 4-5,000 feet of climbing, but today we started at an elevation of a little over 3,000 feet so we didn't feel like we had climbed that high. Overall, we climbed to a height of about 6,600 feet on the needles highway, which is the tallest elevation we have been at on the trip thus far. We made some mac and cheese for dinner and chit chatted with John and Rob for a little before going to bed. We rode 63.05 miles today. The past two days have definately been our favorite on the trip thus far, so much so that we don't want to leave!
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