NASA is good for all kinds of things. Researching the origins of the universe, for example, or promoting international cooperation. And sure, those things are great and noble and all, but when it comes down to the cool factor, it’s NASA’s photos that take the cake.

The NASA Image of the Day site is fairly popular at my office, and my coworkers with a nerdy streak aren’t above using the occasional image for their computer desktop. The Mars rovers have made pretty regular appearances, in fact.

I’ve seen some pretty stellar pictures of Earth lately, so I thought I’d root around and see if there were some nice satellite images of the Black Hills. The Booster Bunch didn’t disappoint. I found a really nice and detailed image, above. (Click here if you want to download the full image from NASA.)It was taken as part of a study on drought. You can see Belle Fourche Reservoir at the top of the picture, Keyhole Reservoir (in Wyoming) on the left side and Rapid City sprawling out from the edge of the hills on the right. I think the division between the Black Hills proper and the Bear Lodge Mountains, the part of the Black Hills that spills into Wyoming on the northwest side, is pretty striking.

So’s the difference between the green hills and the brown plains. Anyone who’s driven to the Black Hills in the summer can attest to the sudden change from brown, dried out grasslands to emerald ponderosa forests. The distinct change in landscape led some early travelers to describe the Black Hills as “an island in a sea of prairie,” and it’s easy to see why when you look at a photo like this.

The city of Deadwood has been recognized for its historic and tourist attracting features.  Deadwood ranks No. among the 2009 Top Ten True Western Towns chosen by True West magazine.

Deadwood has long been known for its historic preservation and restoration.  Just taking a walk down the cobblestone Main Street surrounded by preserved casinos and hotels shows the city’s true Western heritage marked by the days of Wild Bill Hickok and Jack McCall. Many a sightseer or history buff has taken time to witness one of the city’s famed reenactments, such as the 100th anniversary of the last overland wagon run to Deadwood, or one the various gunfights on the city’s main street.

Also worthy of mention are the city’s various celebrations, including that of the Chinese New Year recognizing the city’s past immigrants, and numerous historical sites such as the Adams Museum and House and the Days of 76 Museum.

True West Magazine did its homework when making the decision.  The magazine reveres the fact that Deadwood, with a population of only slightly over 1,200 residents, is putting $7 million into historic preservation, made possible by the 1.5 million visitors who venture to the city every year.

“Deadwood is unique in so many ways—including its dedication to historic preservation”said Bob Boze, the magazine’s editor. “Just as important, the local folks share what they’ve learned with their counterparts from around the country. Deadwood’s work deserves all the recognition and honors it can get.”

The Black Hills’ famed Western city has undoubtedly received deserved recognition for its part in preserving the frontier heritage of South Dakota and the rest of the United States.

Last weekend I rediscovered the joys of winter hiking in the Black Hills. In recent years, I’ve gotten a bit lazy and spent most of my winter time walking around Rapid City or sometimes venturing up Dinosaur Hill.

But really, the dead of winter is a great time to hike. And depending on where you go in the Black Hills, you don’t necessarily need cross country skis or snowshoes or other gear. (A warm coat, however, is important.) Besides, even in the dead of winter the Black Hills can be pretty nice.

And because the creeks are frozen over, you can hike paths not available in the summer. You can march right up the middle of a frozen waterway, instead of the more circuitous summer routes over rocks and trees. Of course, if you hear a popping sound it might be time to get back on the banks.

The ice has this fluid, melted candle-wax look to it as it flow over rocks and across flat spots.

On the day after Christmas, I grabbed the dogs and headed to the Centennial Trail just downstream from Sheridan Lake. By the time we got to the trailhead, it was snowing hard. The dogs plunged happily ahead. They stumbled on the ice, nosed the snow for hidden mice. I followed along behind them. It was so quiet; I could almost hear the snow falling.

Dan has been a video-posting fool, so I thought I’d jump into the party and add one of my own. Jerry Bryant, our friendly neighborhood archeologist, passed along this MySpace vid of the entrance to the Two Bit mine just a couple of miles outside Deadwood. The camera person doesn’t go past the entrance, but it’s some great scenery - and a little creepy.

The Two Bit mine wasn’t a huge operation like Homestake, but it did help feed a small mining town of the same name. The town is gone, to my knowledge, but the Library of Congress has some great Depression-era photos of the abandoned mining camp before it was razed.

The other day I stumbled across this animated video of the proposed biking and hiking trail system on M Hill in Rapid City. As you know, the hill, also known as Cowboy Hill, has been set aside as a 240-acre park for mountain bikers and hikers.

On one side, you can see Rapid Creek, and on another side you can see West Boulevard.

About the only real step that has been taken is to set it aside, but given its location in the heart of fast-developing Rapid City, that’s a very important step. Longer term plans call for creation of a system of trails of varying difficulty – kind of like a ski area.

That’s where this video comes it. I think the folks at the city Parks & Recreation Department  gave this to me. I filed it away and forgot about it. The various colors of the trails represent the degrees of difficulty.

Cowboy Hill  was private property for years — but that didn’t stop people from climbing up its slopes for a view of the city or plying the deer trails that criss-cross the property.

But last year, a private foundation purchased much of Cowboy Hill, also known as M Hill, for creation of a wilderness park. Now, the foundation, the city of Rapid City and area mountain bike groups are turning the hill into a low-impact wildland hiking and biking park.

Last May, Cowboy Hills hosted the first-ever Black Hills Fat Tire Festival. The 2009 festival, by the way, starts May 23 to May 26.

The new park connects with the city’s existing 12-mile bike path system, a paved trail that runs along the greenway created after the 1972 Rapid City flash flood, which killed 238 people and changed the complexion of Rapid City forever.

Eventually Cowboy Hill and the bike path system will connect with another wild area within the city limits of Rapid City. The 150-acre Skyline Drive Wilderness, the other hogback ridge that divides the city, was donated to the city in early 2007.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial has launched the long process of creating a new General Management Plan for the 1,200-acre park. Although that sounds like a big bureaucratic process – and there is a lot of that – it is a chance for people to help shape the future of the park.

If you’ve been to Mount Rushmore, or if you ever plan to go, you might check out the National Park Service website devoted to the Rushmore’s GMP.

“This year we will begin to develop a new General Management Plan to set long-term directions for the overall management and development of the memorial for the next 15 to 20 years,” Superintendent Gerard Baker said in a letter posted on the site. “The new plan will help us make decisions on the direction of resource management, visitor use and interpretation, and facilities management.”

There has been a lot of discussion lately about some of the historical initiatives that have been launch. The new superintendent has made a point of bringing more Native American perspective to the memorial’s interpretive exhibits. And there’s been some discussion about opening up more hiking and recreation within the memorial boundaries.

I’m personally intrigued by the hiking trail proposal. There are some very interesting views of Mount Rushmore, and some very nice woods, around the memorial. I could see Mount Rushmore becoming a day-long day trip for locals and visitors alike.

Baker noted that the last time Rushmore had a new General Management Plan was 1980. And if you’ve been to the memorial from time to time over the years, you know how much the place has changed since 1980.

Now, try to think about what it will be like in 2040. That’s the task for Gerard Baker and the National Park Service.

Photographer Kristina Barker brings a fresh pair of eyes to Black Hills photojournalism. A transplant from the Bay Area of California, she’s been shooting for the Rapid City Journal for about a year now.

Her blog, http://kristinabarker.blogspot.com, recently featured several photos of Deadwood. She shot them during an assignment for the Journal. (I have to disagree with her assessment of Deadwood; you don’t have to look far to find .)

She’s also done a number of very interesting personal photos of the Black Hills and the surrounding plains — scenes I’ve driven by hundreds of times without giving a second look.

Kristina is young and has a great eye. I suspect she’ll be moving on in a few years.

Not too soon, I hope.

I shot this photo a couple of years ago just south of Mount Rushmore. That’s a tree stump underneath all that lichen and moss. It’s hard to tell when the tree was cut down, but the area had definitely been logged at some point in the past 110 years.

In fact, commercial logging has taken place in much of the Black Hills since 1898, when America’s first-ever federal timber sale took place on a tract of land near Nemo in the central Black Hills. Prior to that, miners and loggers cut timber here on a catch-as-catch-can basis near the emerging towns and gold mines.

But in 1893 a series of large forest fires focused attention on the need to protect the nation’s timber from fire, wasteful lumbering practices and timber fraud, according to an account posted on the Black Hills National Forest website. On Feb. 22, 1897, President Grover Cleveland established the Black Hills Forest Reserve.

Two years later, in 1898, the first commercial timber sale on federal forest land in the United States was authorized near Nemo. Cutting began around Christmas of 1899.

Folks in the timber industry tell me that timber sale became a model for forest management nationwide. And they also note, with a certain pride, that the trees in that particular area are strong and healthy, with little evidence that it had ever been logged. I can’t remember for sure, but I think they told me that area might have actually been logged twice in the past 110 years.

The Black Hills logging industry is a lot different these days. In the old days, just about every town in the Black Hills had a sawmill, its tepee burner smoldering all day long. Some towns had more than one sawmill.  Loggers are still working the Hills, but you don’t see them as much.  And just a handful of sawmills are still going. There are big operations in Hill City, Spearfish and Hulett, Wyo. And some small outfits, like Baker Timber Products near Rockerville, still cut lumber for local and specialty markets.

And the tepee burners are long gone. Most sawdust is carted off the Merillat particle board plant in Rapid City. And another company, KL Process Design Group, is working on ways to turn forest waste into ethanol.

So when you’re walking in the Black Hills National Forest, you mightfeel you’re treading on ground that has never been trod before. Not likely — but at least most of the forest has been left pretty much the way it was before.

The only surprise is that they waited this long to pull the plug.

Originally called the Dunrail, the project was part of Costner’s $100 million Dunbar Resort first proposed in 1991. (Lt. John Dunbar, if you recall, was the name of Kevin Costner’s character in his 1990 movie, “Dances With Wolves.”) A 1950s-style streamliner passenger train would pick tourists up at Rapid City Regional Airport and deliver them to a depot in Whitewood. There the passengers would board an old steam-powered train for a scenic trip through Whitewood Canyon to the casinos of Deadwood and the Dunbar Resort.

That was the original idea. It went through a number of changes over the years. I think the airport was dropped from the plan, then the Dunbar itself fell by the wayside. Dunrail Corp. — folks in railroading circles began jokingly referring to it as the “Dunfor” — became Black Hills Transportation Co. The line itself was to be named the Deadwood, Black Hills & Western Railroad. (That’s the logo above.)

Ralph Justen, a very nice fellow who had operated vintage excursion trains elsewhere, came aboard a couple of years ago. It looked like some form of the old Dunrail idea might actually materialize. He even talked about a network of passenger trains and buses running to Hot Spring, Wall and Belle Fourche.

But I think it was already too late. The company had a dubious claim for a right-of-way through Whitewood Canyon and no trackage rights on existing lines between Rapid City and Whitewood.

And financing was always just around the corner, but not quite there. (The delays became absurd, in my opinion, in late 2001 when Ralph’s predecessor told me that financing was in place; however their Wall Street investment bank was destroyed in the 9-11 terrorist attacks. They would have to start over.)

Black Hills Transportation couldn’t regain the credibility lost during the Dunrail years. There were just too many false starts and false hopes over the years. After 15 years, few people took the idea seriously.

In some ways, it’s a shame. Despite all its problems, the idea of an honest-to-God passenger train in the Black Hills that served as both transportation system and tourist attraction was an intriguing idea. Personally, I think it would have been a lot of fun to ride the train through Rapid City and on to Deadwood. And if the price was right, I might have been able to use the train for my daily commute.

Now the nation is taking a tentative look at passenger trains as a way to ease highway and skyway congestion, reduce greenhouse gases and cut fuel consumption. At a Barack Obama campaign appearance in Rapid City last spring, I was surprised to hear the future president talking about restoring passenger rail service in America. I didn’t realize that idea was on the table.

Maybe people like Kevin Costner and Ralph Justin were just ahead of their time. And maybe someday we’ll be taking the the 3:10 to Deadwood after all.

There’s an old ranch along the Rochford-to-Deerfield Road that I’ve always found interesting. Named the Reynolds Ranch, it looks as if is frozen in time. The metal-clad barn is in near perfect condition.  The ranch sits in a beautiful valley, almost at the base of White Tail Peak. Castle Creek runs nearby.

The whole place has a haunting beauty, especially in the winter.

I have to confess I don’t know much about its history.  A friend who lives in the area told me that it’s an old stagestop on the Cheyenne-to-Deadwood Stage Line. He showed me the old route that runs along the west side of the prairie.

Apparently the Reynolds family has lived on the land here since the days of the Deadwood gold rush. The sprawling Reynolds Prairie to the south was part of the same ranch at one time. Members of the family still ranch nearby, but I don’t believe they still own the house or the barn.

If you ever get a chance, you might want to include this road in an afternoon drive. If you keep going south, you’ll see the original town of Deerfield, or what’s left of it.

And if you know anything about the history of the Reynolds Ranch, please let me know.