Black Hills - Little Devils Tower to trailhead, South Dakota (10/11/15, 7:56:29AM)
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Trail stats
- Distance
- 8.56 mi
- Elevation gain
- 449 ft
- Technical difficulty
- Moderate
- Elevation loss
- 2,051 ft
- Max elevation
- 7,008 ft
- TrailRank
- 26
- Min elevation
- 5,262 ft
- Trail type
- One Way
- Time
- one hour 11 minutes
- Coordinates
- 954
- Uploaded
- April 3, 2019
- Recorded
- October 2015
near Sylvan Lake Resort, South Dakota (United States)
Viewed 184 times, downloaded 1 times
Itinerary description
We parked at the trailhead of trail #4 about an hour before dawn and hiked with headlamps for a while in full dark. The trail is quite easy to follow for the first two-thirds and there was no issue with this. After about 20 minutes it started lightening up enough to turn off the headlamps. By the time we reached the top of the ridge where the turn-off to Little Devils Tower branches off to the left, the eastern horizon was turning red behind Cathedral Spires. The trail gets steep after that, especially the last scramble up the rocks to the peak. The hike up took us about 50 minutes. We arrived about 10 minutes before the sun, and it was beautiful watching the hills glow red with the light of the new sun. There are lots of quartz crystals embedded in the rock, and the sun would hit some of these while the rest of the rock was still in the shadow, which looked very cool. The wind was quite stiff while we were there. We stayed about an hour, then hiked back down in about 45 minutes. We didn't see any other people until the end when we were a few minutes out from the trailhead. Beautiful land. This GPS track is only the descent.
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