Photo by Terry Palmer

Roughlock falls is one of three sizable falls in Spearfish Canyon. A wagon road once ran up the canyon, and wagon drivers navigating the steep road used a technique called rough-locking (locking the wheels in place and letting them skid the trail) to make it down the slope.

Betty Lou Stratton took this photo outside her back door in Kadoka. Rain drops covered the spider web, illuminating its beautiful design.

Late August is a busy month for spiders - you might be noticing them around more than ever. They tend to go into a frenzy of activity in late summer to get ready for the coming winter. An increase in spider webs around your property, and spiders inside your house are some side effects. Hopefully you'll see some beauty in their annual rituals, like Betty Lou did.

Gale Sohler, at the steak fry.

Gale Sohler has been a good friend to cattlemen throughout the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana for 40 years, and on Tuesday he and the Sohler family celebrated all their years in the livestock auction business with a big steak fry at the Stockmen's Livestock Auction which is just down the road from our magazine office. They served steaks to a huge crowd and at 1:00 they put away the grill and started the regular Tuesday cattle sale.

Gale has also been involved in stockyards at St. Onge in the Black Hills, Newell, Platte and Bowman, N.D. For years, he and his wife, Janet, drove across the state for the Friday sales at St. Onge. They leased the yards and helped to rebuild it to respectability after a previous owner encountered financial troubles and wrote a big batch of bad checks to the ranchers. That's hard to overcome, but they brought St. Onge back.

My brothers and I grew up attending sales at Stockmen's Livestock. Dad and our neighbors always liked the place because they thought Gale and his crew worked as hard to get a good price for the smaller farmers as they did for the big operations.

Now their son, Jay (serving steaks below) is part of the crew. Yankton has grown up around their Yankton yards, but the Sohlers run such a clean operation that the city gets almost no complaints. A big black cow did run past our office windows one day but it wasn't Gale's fault; the farmer didn't use enough baling wire on the stock trailer gate, and it popped open on the railroad tracks. Stockmen's has been a good neighbor.

"I AM BACK" will be a great t-shirt and bumper stick for Tim Johnson in 2008. They were the closing words of his emotional 15 minute homecoming speech Tuesday at the Sioux Falls Convention Center. The thousand people in attendance welcomed him with rauccaus applause, then the hall grew still with silence as he spoke officially for the first time in 2007. "You guys are a sight for sore eyes," he said. "It's good to be home in South Dakota."

With Barb alongside and his three children -- Brook, Brendan and Kelsey behind him, with spouses and grandkids -- the senator seemed as at ease behind the microphone as you might expect from, well, from a U.S. senator.

A few hours later, ABC's Nightline devoted its entire show to Johnson's illness and his comeback over the past nine months. It was a puff piece, but then how else do you do a documentary on a softspoken, likeable leader who suffers a sudden and potentially lethal brain injury, and who awakens from a coma and fights back with the help of a devoted wife and family. All the while his friends and constituents await his return 1,500 miles to the west, while politicos in Washington wonder whether he will be able to return and reclaim his deciding chair in a divided government.

This is high drama in America, and South Dakota became the stage yesterday. The Nightline show not only cast the Johnson family in glowing light, but also our entire state. South Dakota came across as a solid and decent place that sent a similarly solid man to Washington, where he suffered a great adversity. As he battled back from near death, we waited patiently with grace and caring. Quite a beautiful story for South Dakota. The good news is that it is all true.

Postscript: Nightline nearly ended Tim Johnson's political career in 1986 when he first ran for Congress and faced a tough primary challenge from fellow state senator Jim Burg of Wessington Springs. The 1980s were tough on the farm, and Burg gained ground when he voiced the farmers' woes on a special Nightline show hosted by Ted Koppel. It was filmed when the entire state legislature lobbied in Washington for assistance. Burg's campaign team used the appearance as an example of his leadership, but election day was bright and sunny and as it turned out, many farmers were too busy in the fields to turn out in the numbers Burg needed to beat Johnson, a Vermillion attorney. Burg and Johnson remained friends; Burg was in the crowd last night to welcome him home. And he probably enjoyed Johnson's Nightline apperance more than anyone; after all, he knows how it feels to get a boost from that show.

We've witnessed a lot of political dramas over the last 30 years — announcements, projects, victories, defeats, resignations, fundraisers and publicity stunts.

Today's homecoming of our U.S. Senator Tim Johnson seems to rise beyond all the above. In fact, it's refreshing to see that even the most partisan snipers who play in the blogosphere don't feel like toying with this event. Truly, the entire state of South Dakota — and surely thousands more in Washington, D.C., and around the nation are thankful for this quiet senator's humble return to public life.

We join all of you in welcoming Tim Johnson back home to South Dakota.

Good judgement comes from experience. No other senator in the U.S. Congress can claim to have traveled the road of Tim Johnson this past year. No other has had his unique hardship and experience. His injury may slow his walk or his talk, but it will make him a better senator.

Photo: Sen. Johnson, with his chief of staff Drey Samuelson in May.

The Black Hills are beautiful and interesting above ground, but there's another amazing world beneath the pines that most of us have never seen. I've heard geologists and mineralogists say that there is no other 50x100 mile region in the world with the geological diversity and treasure of the Black Hills.

Some of the world's longest caves are there -- perhaps the longest. We don't know because explorers haven't found the ends. Maybe someday a spelunker will poke his head up out of the cave's final curve and find himself in Memorial Stadium in Lincoln., Neb., during a Cornhusker-Sooner football game?

Some of the mines under the mountains have tunnels that also run deep into the earth. They say there's an 80' lake inside the Etta Mine near Keystone.

One of the truly enjoyable facets of publishing South Dakota Magazine is watching a story unfold over the course of a few issues. Such is the case of the Floating Bronco.

It all began in our July/August '07 issue when he mentioned that a retiring Omaha World Herald outdoors editor mentioned seeing a Bronco speed by him on Lake Oahe while fishing. He said it was among his most memorable moments and he always wondered what it was all about.

We got a letter form Duane Slunecka of Miller, S.D., just in time for our Sept/Oct '07 issue. Duane writes that Werner "Mugs" Martinmaas had such a vehicle. "Mugs was an inventor of sorts who lived in Watertown. I remember seeing this unique 'boat' in Miller, parked on the street. Mug's wife was from Miller."

So we knew the name of the boat's owner. Now if we only had a picture. And today Chad Coppess (one of the state's really good photographers) reads Duane's letter and realizes that he has a picture of a Bronco on Lake Oahe but he was never sure of exactly whose it was.

Now if we just knew how many KPG it got (knots per gallon).

This feels like a summer's day as of high noon, but I happened to be west of Yankton as the sun came up over Lewis and Clark Lake and from there it was easy to hear autumn knocking at the calendar door. A few geese were flying low over the lake (locals I'm sure); the gulls were squawking and carp were flipping and flopping in the rippling water. Just a few boats were starting to stir, mostly anglers looking for walleye. The changing seasons are joys to behold at sunrise and sunset, whether experienced from a back porch, a farm or a prairie lake.