Rebecca Terk

An arm and hand holding up a cherry red demi-sized bottle of chokecherry wine against a backdrop of leafless deciduous trees.

Second bottling of 2025 harvest chokecherry wine today.
Primarily focused on “picnic-sized” 375ml demis plus a few full-sized 750ml bottles.
This batch produced just shy of two cases & the siphoner/bottler (me) is feeling fine from sampling the spillage. 😁

Ugh, yes. That’s my altitude here in the Black Hills of SoDak & baking is always a crapshoot. I tend to stick with the recipe and bake 10 degrees hotter, but that’s not always a perfect solution

🚩 LAKOTA SACRED SITE IN DANGER!! 🚩

Pete Lien & Sons (PLS) are coming to destroy our culture and our history!

This morning, February 27th, 2026, the Black Hills National Forest issued a permit to drill for graphite at sacred site Pe’sla — despite community outcry to stop the project.

One thick grove (among dozens on this 80-acre property) of young Ponderosa pine on a slope with thick grass & low-growing juniper underneath & snowy areas downslope in the trees’ shade. This grove (and all the others) needs thinning to promote healthy growth & reduce fire danger.

A view downslope from a shady, snowy area with an old stump and line of low growing juniper. It looks out into a blue-sky landscape with a mix of Ponderosa pine of various heights.

A 14yo medium-sized long black dog with pointed ears, short Corgi-type legs and a white chest & muzzle and purple collar. He’s standing on ground that is a mix of thick dried brown grass and snowy patches. He’s looking intently out of the frame of this shot to determine what his “little” 95lb, 3yo sister pup has discovered in deeper snow on the forest floor (and whether it’s worth the effort of running over to check it out).

View of a snowy grassland and forest landscape with tall Ponderosa pines. In the foreground is an old pile of 10-12’ long, medium to large-diameter, partially-rotted logs that were left after the previous landowner’s logging operation. These are wildfire fuels that should never have been abandoned, and they will take multiple decades to break down. They’ve already been sitting there at least a decade & maybe closer to two. We’ll eventually need to get to all these piles and break them up into smaller chunks to grind up or burn with our slash piles (provided we get enough snow to safely burn). Seeing all these piles sometimes makes me shake my head and/or feel very tired

When my chainsaw battery ran out yesterday, my own battery was nearly exhausted.
Took a walk & tried not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work to do.
Doesn’t matter if it’s never “done.”
We love doing it.
Guess if my 14yo Corgi mutt can keep on w/ his lil legs, so can I.

Scored a phone convo with our state rural forestry coordinator this morning.
She’s a hard woman to reach these days with all the wind storm damage insanity but once you’ve got her, she’ll tell you everything you wanted to know plus all the stuff you didn’t know you needed to know. 🔥

Also, “there”

Uh, desert. Clearly I need to eat dinner

It felt good to be out of the race
In the dessert you can remember your face
Cause they’re ain’t no one gettin’ up in your space
Lalaaala
Lalalala

Yeah, I give my old ranch rescue extra cuddles and talk to him about what a good, warm, couch & pillow-having life he has now.
And he kinda groans & stretches out in front of the fire while I rub his belly. We’re both happy. ❤️

Uranium Mining - Dakota Rural Action second uranium project threatens craven canyon comments due to forest service by March 3rd A view from the rim of Craven Canyon, where a Canadian company wants to conduct exploratory drilling for radi...

It ain’t the worst thing to spend a chilly afternoon making a public comment on proposed uranium exploration in an area of MASSIVE cultural & archaeological import.
It’s really the best way to stay cozy.

And you don’t need to live here to comment (do it)!

www.dakotarural.org/our-work/ura...

A German Shepherd-Bernese Mountain mix dog curled up onto a single couch cushion with her petite nose resting on a soft blue toy. One of her tiny tiny wolf footsies is resting on the arm of the couch & her diminutive little ship’s rope of a tail is tucked around her delicate powder-puff haunch. There is actually nothing teeny-tiny about this great floof-beast sweetheart. But she definitely believes she is still a tiny baby.

I thought we had a giant floof-beast, but all I see is a tiny baby puppy
#DogsofBluesky

A Cuckoo Korean-made rice cooker. I still haven’t figured out how to change the voice from Korean to English but I have figured out how to make perfect white & brown rice as well as other grains. Omg the barley I made tonight! It’s a magic machine. And there’s a whole world of additional grain- and meal-making functionality I’ve yet to discover.

Folks waxing poetic about their rice cookers so I’ll chime in too.
I hate appliances & was for decades a liquid-over-rice-to-knuckle stovetop believer & then got a fancy cooker on big discount.
Perfect rice of all kinds. Best barley ever. More experiments coming
Set it. Forget it. This is the way.

Burning Beetle events canceled due to extreme fire danger in the Black Hills The 2026 Burning Beetle Torch March, burn event and fireworks in Custer have been canceled due to extreme fire danger and unusual winter conditions.

The 2026 Burning Beetle Torch March, burn event and fireworks in Custer have been canceled due to extreme fire danger and unusual winter conditions.

Activists Speak Out Against Proposed Exploratory Uranium Drilling near 7,000+ Year Old Historical Site - The Rapid City Post BLACK HILLS, SD — A proposed exploratory mining operation dubbed “October Jinx”, conducted by Canadian-based company “Clean Nuclear Energy Corporation”

“Craven Canyon is truly a world-class archeological site that exists here right here in the Black Hills, and in doing this CNEC is really setting up all of humanity to be robbed of an unbelievable and wondrous part of our shared human history.”

rapidcitypost.com/groups-speak...

A mature Ponderosa pine is at center of the image, with smaller pines & white spruce surrounding—primarily in the background. At the base, a pile of logs is stacked from the thinning of crowded pines around its perimeter. One felled tree in the foreground awaits bucking.

Sandwiches, a thermos of tea, frolicking pups, and a glorious Valentines Day in the woods.

I got my bike serviced! Gonna ride as much as I can while hoping my insouciance helps bring on the much-needed moisture ❄️

Committee backs state-funded interpretive services in contested cases Lawmakers advance a bill requiring state government to pick up the bill on interpretive services during a contested administrative case.

Great news! This issue has emerged most recently in a contested case on proposed uranium exploration, in which a number of parties are first language Lakota speakers. 🔥
Repeated appeals to include interpretive services have been rejected by the state Board of Minerals.

Homemade pizza with diced leftover deli fried chicken, homemade braised winter squash, sweet peppers, mushrooms, black olives.

(Slice of) Homemade pizza with diced leftover deli fried chicken, homemade braised winter squash, sweet peppers, mushrooms, black olives.

Made the crust between meetings & appointments so we’d have the yummy pizza night tonight.
Leftover Krull’s (Hill City grocery) deli fried chicken & homemade braised winter squash, diced mushrooms, sweet peppers, black olives.

A small black-rimmed, blue-glazed handmade bowl from Blue Earth pottery in Ely, MN. It’s filled with scoops of Cosmic Bliss dark chocolate “ice cream” made from coconut milk. The frozen dessert is sitting in a puddle of Vermont maple syrup and Black Hills Elderberry syrup, which is supposed to be medicinal and frankly this whole thing was medicinal in all the needed ways

It has been a DAY.
A bowl of chocolate “ice cream” (of the non-dairy variety I can digest) bathed in a puddle of both maple & elderberry syrups was practically mandated.
*Sigh*

Understood. I couldn’t wear them anymore (nor flip flops—I like my tootsies protected), but back in the day…👵🏻

Ok, I hear you on the toe sock monster thing, BUT once upon a time, I owned rainbow striped knee-high toe socks, and those were 🔥

Someone planning a polar plunge?

Uranium Mining - Dakota Rural Action second uranium project threatens craven canyon comments due to forest service by March 3rd A view from the rim of Craven Canyon, where a Canadian company wants to conduct exploratory drilling for radi...

YOU can help protect the irreplaceable spiritual and cultural landscape of Craven Canyon from exploratory drilling for radioactive uranium.

Check out the link to learn more & post your comment.

A woodland creek flowing among mossy and clean rocks and downed limbs. Snow lines its banks and some of the larger rocks and hummocks in the creek. A triangle is formed in the background from downed, snapped, and leaning spruce trees, and other healthy spruce trees are on the opposite banks.

Wasn’t up for a full day of work in the woods yet after this latest bout of flu-sinus-crud.
But, oh! The air was so clear & lovely as I slogged through actual SNOW for a couple hours at 6100’ grabbing water samples and assessing wind damaged trees.

Pizza pasty!

I swear I completed so many lil pieces of so many projects today that I can’t even account for all of it.

AND I got to stand in the SUN streaming through the upper window of my office like it hasn’t done since early November.

Feels like getting ahead ☺️

COMMENT TO SAVE CRAVEN CANYON!

Canadian mining company, CNEC, seeks to drill for uranium on Federal land, which rests on the edge of Craven Canyon - a sacred site that contains 8,000-year-old ceremonial petroglyphs carved into the rock wall.

Graphic by BHFS.

Full moon rises over a canyon rim lined with pines. Another single pine covers the left side of the frame and some thin, leafless deciduous branches encroach on the upper right

Ooo that moon

We get public safety alerts about traffic collisions that have occurred farther away than the area in which this armed & dangerous dude is presumed to be hiding.