Even those who are less romantic, less sentimental about the natural landscape will admit sensing something different here.

The feeling that these woods, these rocks, these meadows are special persists today. It was a place for seeking visions - often at the summit of Harney Peak, known in various Plains Indian dialects as the 'tall rock mountain at the center of the world.' Now comprising over 13,000 acres of undeveloped national forest land, the area was named in 1980 for the Lakota holy man whose life story is chronicled in John Neihardt's classic Black Elk Speaks. Not only did the area provide an abundance of needed game, plant life and seasonal refuge, but it was also believed to be an especially sacred area. The Black Elk Wilderness Area is at the heart of the Black Hills which were held in holy trust by the Native Americans who lived for thousands of years on the plains surrounding them. The world had been laid at our feet.īut the sense of being poised between heaven and earth had as much to do with the character of this landscape - the Black Elk Wilderness Area - as it did with our aerie lookout to watch the turning of the celestial orbs. We could survey bony outcroppings of granite thousands of feet below. Harney Peak, which at 7,242 feet is the highest point east of the Rockies, was an over-the-shoulder glance behind us. We had spent the night on the shelves of this cliff some 6,000 feet up, and there wasn't much between us and the towering South Dakota sky. There was fire in the sky that morning as the flaming sun rolled over the dim horizon, as the lower sky broke into a radiant orange, as the last of the morning stars glimmered in the cobalt-blue expanse of the infinite overhead. The most immediate was our sunrise breakfast on a high-pitched ledge of rock on the eastern slopes of the Black Hills. The assessment seemed right, for several reasons. “How does it feel,' my companion asked as he sipped coffee at dawn, 'to be perched on the edge between heaven and earth?'

Black elk peak trail length