A Journey Through the American Wilderness
The wind hit me like a giant invisible hand, slapping my motorcycle sideways as I rode at 65 miles per hour. I was traversing the Buffalo Gap National Grassland, a vast and open landscape with no trees or buildings to blunt the gusts. My bike zigzagged, sending my stomach into my esophagus.
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So much of motorcycling is trial by fire. Practice all the parking lot U-turns you want—the real learning happens in the saddle. With only a few months’ riding experience under my belt, I had chosen one of America’s most storied routes for my first big motorcycle trip.
Source: media.cntraveler.com
From the layer-cake buttes of Badlands National Park to the winding canyons of the Black Hills, this part of South Dakota is legendary. I had come to South Dakota chasing a familiar American trope: the lone wolf disappearing into the horizon, chrome glinting in the sun. Motorcycling has long been shorthand for reinvention—the idea that, if you just keep riding, you can outrun whatever holds you back.
A Culture of Connection
To do it safely requires total presence. You see the road, the sky, some hothead tailing you in the mirror. You smell manure baking in the sun. You hear the roar of every passing semi and the hammering of your own heart. When you hit a pothole, your bones rattle like coins in a coffee tin. It’s adrenaline, yes, but also a needed focus, the only thing that can quiet my over-revving brain.
In pop culture, motorcycling is often sold as a solitary pursuit. But on this trip, what surprised me most was how quickly it built connection, not just with the landscape but with other people. The women I rode with proved that. We were a group of strong, capable, and independent women who had chosen the open road as a way to find freedom and adventure.
The Power of the Open Road
Over four days and 421 miles, we traveled light—backpacks strapped to our Royal Enfields and Triumph—and took the long way ’round whenever we could. We ramble from Rapid City to Deadwood through big hills and blind turns, a ballet of downshifting on steep ascents and resisting the urge to gawk at the cinematic scenery lest we go flying into a ravine.
We brake for bighorn sheep and small-town homecoming parades with Jesus floats and football players flinging candy from the beds of pickup trucks. Over elk burgers in bars decorated with longhorns and license plates, we swap stories of toxic parents, failed marriages, hatfishing (guys who look hot ’til their helmet comes off), and those outlaw groups like the Hell’s Angels and Mongols, whose violence has cast a shadow over the 99 percent of riders who want nothing to do with them.
On the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway, we coast at 35 miles per hour, taking in naked rock faces and Bob Ross pines before arriving at Shortgrass Resort in Spearfish. The boutique retreat, founded by motorcyclists Jared “Cappie” Capp and former NASA scientist Rachel MK Headley, offers a farm-to-table restaurant and eight luxurious suites overlooking 52 acres of prairie on the Redwater River.
The next day we make the requisite stop at Mount Rushmore—four granite presidents staring into perpetuity, equal parts engineering marvel and highly contested heritage site—before tackling the Wildlife Loop in Custer State Park. Navigating its hairpin turns with few guardrails, I fix my gaze on the centerline and will myself not to overcorrect.
Later we pause to admire a herd of bison, freshly corralled after the annual Buffalo Roundup, and I make the mistake of approaching their pen with my helmet still on. When one “fluffy cow” charges the fence, I peel out faster than Evel Knievel clearing the Snake River Canyon.
By the time we collapse into bed at the historic Hotel Alex Johnson in Rapid City, 12 hours later, my haunches ache and my throttle hand is locked in a Lego-man grip. Physically, I feel like Wile E. Coyote after a steamroller incident. But mentally? I’m on top of the world.
