The park is most famous for containing much of the world’s boxworks, pictured, which is the ‘mortar’ left over after most of the rock dissolved. The tour included a recitation of the origin myth of the Lakota people and the bison, since the cave is a central and sacred part of the story. The neighboring Custer State Park is a great place to see bison today, and they often wander across the road.

Since I was inspired here by an obscure fact about forest fire frequency, here’s another rant. There’s a popular misconception that park service mismanagement or ”fire suppression” caused many forests to overfill with fuel, creating conditions for today’s wildfires. Smokey the Bear encouraged people not to smoke or leave campfires unattended, but neither he nor the forest service has ever had the ability to put out a naturally occurring wildfire. Even the best efforts today can merely partially contain wildfires to try to protect structures.

So why did the fuel build up? Well, that’s because farmers, ranchers and timbermen cut down all the surrounding forests. Many of the remaining forests are isolated, so that wildfires that would have entered from neighboring areas stopped. The remedy to restore the natural balance would be to enlarge the forests and regrow the surrounding ecotones or transition zones with native scrub and grassland. Funnily enough, you don’t hear that solution often proposed. Instead, folks use farmer, rancher and timberman logic and suggest scheduled burns, like they use on their land. But there’s nothing natural or statistically normal about following a schedule, so the park service, which is the victim here, is left with no choice but to try to maintain forests artificially, which typically results in lower species diversity than the original.

In any case, with climate change, even using prescribed burns won’t save forests from increased bug damage, warmer winters, hotter summers, drier air, longer wildfire seasons, hotter fires and increased wind. I mention this because there are nearby areas where forests aren’t regrowing, since the extremely high temperature of the fire overcooked the soil, killing the microbial life needed to sustain the original trees. We need more accurate and truthful thinking about fires if we are going to save species in the future.