Don't Stop. I'll Know the Road You're On.

On Sunday, I woke up and my quads were even more sore than the day before and I didn't think that was possible. We went to Perkins for breakfast and then drove over to the Tinton Trail not far from our house.

I had heard about it from a friend of mine who had just discovered it a few weeks earlier. I told John about it and he researched how to get there and what kind of difficulty it was. He talked to the guy who fixed my brakes (he said the increase in altitude sometimes screws with disc brakes), and the guy thought it was a good trail for any kind of skill level.

The trail did have everything. It was mostly an ascent on the way out with some nice, flowy sections in the middle and a really fun descent on the way back. I got to learn how to ride over lots and lots of rocks and I also got to ride through fields of wild flowers. Heavenly.

When we finished riding, we ate lunch, took a short nap and were ready to go. Originally, we were going to ride our road bikes through Speafish Canyon and park them at trails and go on some hikes. Since it was so late, we decided just to drive to the hiking places and ride Spearfish Canyon the next afternoon. I'm so glad we did it that way, so we could focus all of our attention on one activity and not stress ourselves and our senses out by doing too many things at once.

Before we left on our trip, I had Googled, "cool places to hike in the Black Hills and Spearfish" and Devil's Bathtub came up again and again. So did The community Caves. I told John where I wanted to go and gave him some links and he did all of the navigation (because I have no sense of direction).

 The hike to Devil's bathtub required good non-slip hiking boots and walking in water again and again.

It was a beautiful hike and the bathtub itself was FREEZING, but it was pretty amazing to be in a swimming hole with a waterfall flowing over your head.

We headed to Community Caves. It took us a while to find the trail. Very few of the trails we looked for in spearfish were marked very well. One even had a Youtube video to view to help us find it.

Once we were finally on the right path, we climbed and climbed and climbed. We climbed on loose rocks and slippery shale. We climbed so much, I almost whined...

...But holy cow, was it worth it!

Caves with a waterfalls? Who could ask for more than that? Oh, and the views were amazing.

We wandered around in the caves and then climbed even more to a really cool look-out on the other side of the caves that one of the locals told us about.

Then we had to crawl down and that was almost harder than climbing up. I did slip several times, but didn't do any damage to my person any of those times. Whew!

We decided to find some pizza and beer after all of our adventures. We went to Crow Peak brewery because it said they had pizza on their website. When we got there one of the owners told us that sometimes they had pizza and sometimes they didn't and this was one of the times they didn't. That was fine. We each had a beer and went to Dough Traders Pizza Company after that. The food was wonderful there.