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The highest point of Turkey Ridge, near its southern end, is Spirit Mound, so named because Indian tradition claimed that spirits guarded the area. A trapper, Charles LeRaye, visited Spirit Mound in 1802 and was one of the first to describe it in a journal.
Spirit Mound is located six miles north of Vermillion, South Dakota, along State Highway 19. Although there are other hills nearby, the mound, in its relative isolation, is striking. Geologists call this kind of formation, roche moutonee, a bedrock knob that was shaped but not leveled by the last Pleistocene glacier 13,000 years ago.
Turkey Ridge, which remains after glacial action millions of years ago, is the ridged area that runs to the northwest of Spirit Mound north of Vermillion, South Dakota. Turkey Ridge is about 40 miles long, 6 to 8 miles wide, and stands as much as 400 feet above the prairie. The bedrock is Niobrara chalk and Pierre shale covered by a thin veneer of older glacial debris.
At its northern end, Turkey Ridge is the most conspicuous feature along the entire stretch of US Highway 18 from Davis to Menno, SD, standing as much as 400 feet above the prairie. Before the great ice ages, Turkey Ridge was the divide between two large rivers. When additional glaciers came this way, they were too thin and weak to plane down the ridge, so they overrode it, leaving only a thin veneer of glacial debris. The rock core of the ridge is Niobrara chalk, probably with some Pierre shale above it. Both shale layers were laid down in shallow seawater during late Cretaceous age. In the immediate area of Spirit Mound, Turkey Ridge is bounded on the west by the James River lowlands while it is bounded on the east side by the Vermillion River valley. On a clear day, other major rivers can be observed from the summit of Spirit Mound.
Spirit Mound, or Paha Wakan, was known by tribes for miles around before the Lewis and Clark expedition ever came to the area. Lewis and Clark reported the people of the Omaha, Oto, and Yankton tribes believed that the mound was occupied by little people who shot any human who came near.
By the 1790s, when European traders came up the Missouri, reports of this mound must have been well known, although no written record earlier than the journals of Lewis and Clark has been found. It was not until August 25, 1804, the day before they reached the mouth of the Vermillion, that Clark wrote of Spirit Mound in his journals.
Please post your picture with your log message; contact me using my profile e-mail address to answer the questions.
Requirements:
1) Post a picture of you or your group with your GPS at the posted coordinates. UPDATE: Picture is optional.
2) Answer the following questions:
a) What are the two large rivers that can be seen from the summit of Turkey Ridge (as listed on the park historical markers)?
b) What is the elevation at the posted coordinates?
c) What is the elevation at the top of Spirit Mound? (If you do not want to take the .8 mi hike to the top of Spirit Mound, you may calculate from information available at the posted coordinates.)
d) Describe what an early pioneer recalled seeing as they were looking north from the summit?
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