This is the first in a forthcoming series of occasional essays that revisit individual geographer’s early encounters with a particular landscape. The authors have been asked to examine how that landscape might have changed since their initial observation and how their professional perspective might have altered their understanding of that scene. It is our hope that these essays deepen our understanding of the subjectivity and objectivity of place, personal and professional experience
Repeat photography reveals both obvious and subtle changes in common landscapes. Dan Arreola and colleagues (Finn et al. 2009), William Wyckoff (2011), the Vales (Vale and Vale 1983 and 1994), and others (Meyer and Young 2018; Bass 2013) have produced significant contributions to this genre of geographic study. Often the temporal scale of such work exceeds a normal lifetime or career and thus enables the linking of scenes captured by one photographer with those repeated by a different observer more than a generation later. A goal of the second photographer is to frame the scene so that the viewer can compare the more distant past with the very recent past to document and comprehend change.
This essay takes a different approach. I examine landscapes I viewed before my professional career began and then revisited decades later. The objective is to observe physical change of the landscape, but also to consider how my perception of it changed through the course of a career. How have years of training and professional experience altered how I see, respond to, and understand a landscape encountered decades before?
I report on three landscapes that were highly influential as I pursued my college education and, in subtle but significant ways, affected my research. The first place is a small cave above Pine Creek in the Black Hills of South Dakota (Fig. 2), a location I visited briefly as I hitch-hiked from Louisiana to Oregon in the summer of 1972. Although I was there for only a few hours, it proved to be both life-saving (literally) and, in quite unexpected ways. an abiding touchstone for work I undertook much later. The other two places I merely passed through that same year -- Keystone and Rapid City, South Dakota -- but they underwent devastating change that summer and now exemplify vastly different approaches to disaster recovery and anticipation that I only came to comprehend as my career centered on disasters.
Considering landscape change within the scope of a lifetime and from one person’s perspective is fundamentally different from the repeat photography that includes pairs of pictures – one taken by a professional photographer and the second by a geographer seeking to replicate the original image at a later date to document change. Here, I seek to reveal changes in my perspective of a landscape that resulted from long-term academic pursuits. As a college drop-out and before beginning my training in geography, I traveled camera-less in 1972. The images from that era draw on an assortment of historical photos taken by journalists and government officials. I returned to those places in 2017 to revisit settings and images that were seared into my memory decades ago and used my own camera to capture a landscape that endured little change (the cave) and also places that underwent significant alterations with different fundamental goals in terms of public risk.
Traveling along the interstate highway system without a car, as I did in 1972, dramatically alters your view of the roadside. One progresses in spurts. Often a hitchhiker spends hours on a traffic-less on-ramp to an interstate highway, followed by a short sprint to another intersection, always awaiting that long ride with a friendly and alert driver. I set out from Milwaukee , headed to Oregon at around 10:00 am on June 8, 1972. Hitchhiking on the interstate was illegal there, and I had to remain at the lower end of on-ramps to evade state troopers. When deposited at a ramp with no traffic, I hiked some distance through Madison to find a busier location. By late afternoon I had passed Madison, and now stood by the highway somewhere beyond Blue Earth, Minnesota.
As dusk was falling, I was contemplating finding a place to camp for the night when a driver in a sporty, but well-used MG coupe, pulled over and offered to take me across South Dakota. He had been driving non-stop for 30 hours from New Jersey and needed someone to keep him awake on his final leg to Rapid City. I was expected to earn my ride with lively conversation.
We set off into the night swapping tales of our adventures, but the car broke down in the pre-dawn hours somewhere on the Great Plains, and we spent the next few hours searching for a mechanic (yes, some gas stations still had mechanics on-site) and getting the car rolling again. After that sleepless night and some time watching a creative mechanic coax the car back to life, we reached Rapid City before noon on June 9 and went our separate ways. All in all, it had been a highly successful, if not restful, day riding my thumb – Milwaukee to Rapid City (about 850 miles) in just over 24 hours.
I wanted to explore the nearby Black Hills and made my way through the city and up to the tourist town of Keystone - gateway to the Black Hills (Fig. 1). Its commercial kitsch of motels, restaurants, and gift shops was unappealing, and I sought a more rugged setting. So I hiked more than hitched rides up the road paralleling Battle Creek that was lined with RV campgrounds and rental cottages. It was a far cry from the back country camping I was seeking. Finally, a teenager on a dirt bike gave me a lift to a US Forest Service campground at Horse Thief Lake. I wandered through a collection of pop-up trailers and large family tents at the formal campground and found a trail leading into a narrow mountain gorge.
A short distance up Pine Creek, a tiny mountain stream that I could step across, I found a secluded site shaded by giant Ponderosa pines where I made camp, cooked supper, and began to settle in for the night - relieved that I had found an ideal site. My journal entry read: “Have had splendid weather for hitching, but it may rain tonight.”
Ominous clouds proved my forecast correct and a gentle rain disrupted my hope for a restful night. Although I considered myself weather savvy, I hadn’t outfitted myself with a tent. My expectation of an unvarying dry climate across the semi-arid plains was thoroughly undermined by actual conditions. Fortunately, I noticed a small cave about 10-15 feet up a modest slope above my creekside campsite (Fig. 2). It looked like a good shelter, so I doused my fire, and scrambled up towards the dark opening. The cave’s mouth was about 10 feet high, and the cavity extended a dozen or so feet back into the cliff. I was confident it would provide a weary traveler with ample shelter from a light rain, so I crawled into my sleeping bag, read until darkness fell, and drifted off to sleep.
In the middle of the night, I was awakened by riotous thunder and spectacular lightning. During the frequent flashes of brilliant illumination, I was stunned to see a raging river, where a tiny creek had been, coursing by the cave’s mouth. The mad torrent carried trunks of fallen trees toward the campground that I had walked through the previous afternoon. Circumstances had changed dramatically since sunset. No longer was simply avoiding a drenching the priority; survival jumped to the head of the list. I had to choose between staying put and hoping the water did not rise any further or try to scramble up a steep and completely unfamiliar rock face in the rain (Fig. 2). I wasn’t sure how climbable the slope was even in dry, daylight conditions. Although I was fairly athletic, I had zero mountaineering skills. I was familiar with thunderstorms, but not in this geologic setting, and I had little experience to draw on. Where I came from in the deep South such downpours tended to be short lived, so I stayed put and just kept an eye on the raging flood.
My weather expectations served me well. After the rain let up, the torrent subsided, and by daybreak, the creek was nearly back in its channel. So, I loaded up my gear, hung my wet sleeping bag on the top of my backpack to dry, and trekked out of the gorge. When I reached the main campground, I realized that others had undergone far worse than me. The pop-ups, tents, and vehicles were all gone. I don’t know if they were washed away or if the owners escaped in the night.
Still not realizing the scale of the event, and as long as I was in the neighborhood, I naively began a hike towards Mount Rushmore to view the famous landmark. Almost immediately, a family stopped to give me a ride, and as I climbed into their station wagon, they proclaimed, “You’re alive!” This was an unexpected greeting since I didn’t know why they might have thought otherwise. As we drove towards Mount Rushmore, they relayed the news that there had been deadly floods in nearby Keystone and Rapid City. It began sinking in that the storm was truly disastrous. My wet sleeping bag was insignificant in the grander scheme of things.
At the national memorial thick fog completely obscured the famous stone presidential sculptures. I found myself in a makeshift evacuation shelter and temporary morgue. I spoke to people, wrapped in blankets sipping coffee, who had ridden on the tops of their large RV’s as the flood floated them down Battle Creek valley, where I had wandered searching for a camp site the previous day. Others recounted being awakened in their small rental cabins as they careened with the flood towards Keystone. I observed some campers mobilizing to venture into Rapid City to aid with the recovery efforts. Everywhere I turned, strangers were assisting strangers. Compassion permeated the Visitors Information Center, converted into a disaster triage shelter. My journal entry noted that the tragic circumstances seemed to bring out the best in people. Spontaneous assistance, as I learned over the ensuing decades, is common and a vitally essential component of disaster recovery.
I also learned later that the Weather Service reported that this storm was an exceptional rainfall event. Easterly winds drove moist air up and over the Black Hills forcing heavy rains. The absence of strong upper-level winds caused the thunderstorms to stagnate over the upper basin of several streams and rainfall totals reached 12 to 15 inches over 4 to 6 hours (Fig. 3). Runoff from this deluge roared down the tributaries of Rapid Creek towards Rapid City. A dam upstream from the city failed due to the overwhelming volume of water and released the contents of Canyon Lake.
While some early reports suggested the dam failure was a major cause of downstream damage, it only added a modest amount of water to the massive discharge issuing from the Black Hills and roaring through the low-lying sections of town, tossing cars and mobile homes into jumbled heaps (Fig. 4 & 5). The water flowed by my cave refuge, fed into Battle Creek and joined the torrent that overwhelmed Keystone, destroying about two-thirds of that tourist town. Overall, 230 people died and another 3,000 individuals suffered injuries due to the flooding that night. Damage totals reached $160 million (or $1.2 billion in 2024 dollars) (NOAA 1972).
Society tends to measure disasters by deaths and dollars of damages. The 1972 flood would have hit NOAA’s “billion dollar” mark using 2024 dollars and may have earned a major disaster declaration if that option had existed at the time. As I learned during my professional career, disasters can inspire change, sometimes in the form of better preparation and mitigation. The 1972 event in South Dakota, to my mind, prompted enduring improvements through major reconfiguration of Rapid City’s urban landscape but less so in Keystone. Steps taken to reduce risk are one form of change, but just as often places are allowed to continue to deteriorate over time, especially when there are no repeat events. According to the geographer Lindsey McEwen (McEwen et al. 2017), flood memories can be short-lived. As time passes, residents impacted by extreme events can lose their sense of urgency, and local leaders can begin to pursue seemingly economically advantageous land uses that place people at risk. Development of gambling casinos on the Mississippi Coast after Hurricane Camille in 1969 are evidence of the lure of tax revenue eclipsing memories of a devastating storm surge (Colten and Giancarlo 2011).
After more than 30 years as a practicing geographer who has researched the historical geography of hazards, I revisited the cave above Pine Creek in 2017. To get there, after participating in the South Dakota State Geography Convention, I drove across South Dakota in a rental car and made the ascent into the Black Hills with ease.
I spent very little time in Keystone in 1972. During my brief visit, I walked along the main street and made my exit on the road up Battle Creek as quickly as possible. The commercial strip in 2017, lined with tourist-oriented businesses, seemed familiar enough, repaired from the flood and updated. Post-flood reports indicate the town suffered massive damage and at least 10 fatalities. A local historian observed, “A lot of the shops on Main Street were just flooded out, mudded” (Fig. 6) (KOTA 2022). As is typical following a disaster, media attention focused on the larger city that suffered the most dramatic damage, Rapid City in this case. Keystone was an afterthought for the national and regional media. In the intervening years, Keystone’s restoration quickly transformed the narrow space along Main Street and the flood diminished in the local memory.
Faux frontier architectural styles adorn the restaurants, gift shops, and hotels with names that connect to local historical themes: Native Americans, gold mining, or pioneer settlement (Figs. 7-8). There are no longer traces of the damage, and the community has made considerable investments to fully reinvigorate the commercial strip where it stood a half century before. The local museum celebrates gold mining history, while also acknowledging the flood, and the community held a memorial service on the 50th anniversary in 2022. In addition, there is a memorial to the flood victims (Fig. 9), so the memory has not been erased. Nonetheless, the overt presence of the disaster has largely faded from the landscape and memory. What is notable from a hazards geography perspective is that Keystone has rebuilt in harm’s way and has distanced itself from the painful experience of the 1972 flood.
I drove out of Keystone up the same road along Battle Creek I had traveled in 1972 (Fig. 2). After arriving at Horse Thief Lake Campground, I made one false start up a parallel canyon before rediscovering the correct trail. I was surprised to find my 1972 camp sites and the cave quite easily and took the pictures included here (Figs. 1 and 10). Comparing historical and contemporary photographs, I saw the site had undergone no noticeable change. But upon returning to the scene, however, I realized that my memory had compressed the width of the gorge, but exaggerated the cave’s elevation above the stream bed. My response to my earlier experience also underwent a change. Standing at the cave’s mouth it was obvious that a huge amount of precipitation had to fall to fill that gorge with a raging torrent. I also realized that there was no way I could have scrambled up the rock face above the cave during a thunderstorm (Fig. 10). Visiting this landscape confirmed that I had been extremely fortunate and that the cave truly provided a lifesaving shelter above the flood.
I did not venture back down into Rapid City after the flood in 1972. The fragmentary accounts circulating at the Mt. Rushmore visitors center gave the impression that the entire city had been wiped out when the dam collapsed. In my naivety about flooding and the topography of Rapid City, I was unable to imagine that the damage would have been restricted to low lying areas, and I didn’t want to add a mouth to be fed in the emergency situation. So I struck out into the wilds. After a few days camping in the Black Hills, I headed westward and only caught snippets of news about the impacts since hitchhiking was not ideal for following breaking news. Although the event stayed vivid in my mind as something in the past, I did not follow up to investigate the long-term impacts. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, It came back to me strongly, and became a bridge between my early and then current experiences.
The former mayor of Rapid City, Don Barnett, called me at my LSU office in the days following Katrina to advocate for recovery practices similar to the ones he guided in Rapid City. He made a compelling case that the success of his administration included several key actions. Central to the response was the use of federal dollars to enable flood victims to relocate out of the floodplain via the creation of a massive park along the floodplain that was free of residential or commercial development. These two efforts together significantly reduced ongoing flood risk to individuals and the community more broadly. Indeed, the city’s public works director, who had witnessed several previous floods, argued persuasively that, “we cannot sentence the survivors to one more night on the suicidal flood plain" (South Dakota Public Broadcasting 2022). To pursue this path, the city turned down federal dollars to rebuild the trailer park that had been washed away. Instead, the city council approved a motion to prohibit rebuilding residences in the floodplain. A subsequent report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers advised against a larger flood retention reservoir, and instead recommended a greenway along Rapid Creek (USACE 1973). Tapping federal sources, the city secured low interest loans that residents could use to vacate their houses and rebuild in safe areas. It has steadfastly maintained its restrictions on developing in the floodplain.
Strikingly, In the era before FEMA and the growth of formal academic hazards studies, Rapid City moved away from the traditional reliance on structural approaches, such as levees and dams, and embraced land-use mitigation that had been touted by Gilbert White since the 1940s. The city has created a residence-free green corridor that serves as a multi-purpose public park paralleling Rapid Creek (Fig. 11). Fittingly, the city named its Memorial Park (Fig. 12) to honor those who perished in the flood and has used it effectively to sustain the memory of the 1972 flood. Successive administrations have used the memorial to fend off attempts by developers to encroach onto the floodplain. In an interview with the former mayor in 2017, we discussed his call to me in 2005 and how he spent years since the 1972 flood advocating for flood mitigation through land-use approaches. He is convinced that the approach adopted by the city has proven successful.
Now, over 50 years since my first visit to the Black Hills and nearly 20 years since my immersion in the post-Katrina disaster discussions, I see the cave above Pine Creek, Keystone, and Rapid City in a very different light. There was no record other than my laconic journal entry of my escape from the raging flood. Yet that event remained strong in my memory, and probably led me to hazards research. But it was not part of my regular work. I sometimes used it in my classes to emphasize the threat of flash floods and the importance of safe development. The political leaders of Rapid City worked diligently and tirelessly to overcome the tendency to forget tragedies. Their Memorial Park serves as a heavily used reminder and a safety buffer against a repeat disaster. Since the call from Mayor Burnett in the wake of Katrina in 2005, I have often considered the contrast between Rapid City and New Orleans whose response to flooding engaged me personally and professionally. I think about how the mayor recounted his city’s program to remove people from the floodplain. I know I listened skeptically because the scale of the disaster in New Orleans was so much larger. Yet, I shared and share his hope to provide a more durable means to reduce risk than levees subject to failure. The greenway in Rapid City remains a viable swath of safety. I worry for New Orleans. The massive engineered embankments that took decades to fund and build after a 1965 hurricane failed in 2005. Now after years of reinforcement they are threatened with obsolescence as global warming pushes sea levels well above the base level used in their original design. I imagine repeat photography of these two places, one today, another 50 years hence. New Orleans’ population remains behind the levees, armed with a false sense of security and an increasingly susceptible protection system. With global warming Rapid City might see rainfall totals that exceed the 1972 storms, but by preserving open space along the floodway, it reduces threats to people and personal property.