Chapter 13: Cuny Cafe

Part of the magic and intensity of the Green Tortoise adventure travel experience in the Badlands involves eating dinner prepared by a pair of gregarious Lakota Sioux women at a place called Cuny Cafe. The cafe building doubles as their home on land that bears their family name. Cuny Table is located near Buffalo Gap on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. After eating dinner, the Green Tortoise is permitted to camp on this gorgeous piece of private land under special agreement with the Cuny family. The Green Tortoise has enjoyed a decades-long friendship with the Cuny family fostered by the owner of the Green Tortoise, Gardner Kent since 1972.

From Scenic we drove south and then west toward Buffalo Gap into the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. On the vast treeless wilderness south of Badlands Nation ...