as tuesday continues during our two thousand and eleven sturgis rally road trip we stopped in on rapid city family friendly reptile gardens from the highway you can see this dome coming and going from either direction and it turns out that we have with us the son of the original owner and founder of this place and you are i'm johnny b with reptile gardens and how long has it been here now actually you know this is our seventy fourth year next year  will be a milestone dad started this business around very humble way back in one thousand thirty seven during the depression what was his reason for doing it well my dad  really had a love for reptiles and he had that from a very early age and so when dad was a was a young boy in grade school actually he would go out he'd catch harmless reptiles bulls snakes garter snakes blue racers and that and how dad got attention as a young boy is the neighborhood kids would come over data to show how brave he was playing with the snakes and that kind of fed is eagle as a young kid well by the time he got to high school age a kid impress anybody with you know harmless snakes so dad simply took it up a notch and he would go out he'd catch curry rattlesnakes see only venomous snake within about five hundred miles of the black hills and he would take them home and i don't know how he did this it's something i've never had any desire to do but he would take these rattlesnakes he would play with them work with them play with them work with them and he'd get to a point to where he considered them tame down and he would actually take a live probably rattlesnake and he can hold it in the palm of his hand just like this believe it or not he never was bitten by any of these animals well at the age of nineteen he was hired to work at a little tourist traction and give ters it was a place called hidden city it doesn't exist anymore and anyway dad was a tour guide he was always a showman or big cowboy hat and that he'd big given a tour around this hidden city at the end of the tour or when it was just about over with he would just nonchalantly take his cowboy hat off to wipe the sweat from his brow and yeah sure enough he had one of his pet rattlesnakes on top of his head now you can imagine the people that were at hidden city that were taking a tour at that time they could care less about hidden city they either had questions about reptiles rattlesnakes or not case that would actually have a live rattlesnake on top of his head so that's what gave dad the seed of an idea that when the people hated them or seven back then it was let's see ten cents for kids are for adults and five cents for children that isn't a very very interesting history and and so is this one of the first structures that was built no  actually the original reptile gardens was closer to rapid city it was on the top at the end of skyline drive there was just a little two lane road that came out of rapid city correspond rushmore when  start it wasn't even completed you know part of it was but it didn't get completed until forty one four years after that started reptile gardens but his original location was on top of the hill on highway sixteen and he did that for a very intentional reason actually that was one of his early marketing ideas was to have it on top of this hill because back in the thirty's and forty's cars were very dependable and they overheated all the time so he put his original building on top of the steepest hill coming out of rapid city about half of the cars when they would crest that he'll be things but yeah he was pretty clever that way and then one of his early marketing ideas that was quite clever was he knew that people were attracted to go to places where they saw a lot of crowd a crowd of people in them and he knew the same thing was true with his business so he came up with the concept in the late thirty's into the forty's of something he called dummy cars and so what dad did is he bought eight automobiles parked in front of reptile gardens or so they were there twenty four hours a day but the people the first ones that would come up the highway to morning didn't know that and it kind of looked like there were some activity there so they'd have you know they'd be more likely to stop and visit a good smart businessman so he had a lot of clever things back in sixty four they built a new highway and highway sixty became a four lane and it bypassed the old location and father knew it was very difficult to get people to pull off a highway for something that they couldn't see so he bought this land down here in spring creek valley what about that it's a it's a kind tree skeleton and rather than tearing it out they decided to leave this in and then they were just going to let plants grow around it and actually when i first started here it was a bogan view of vine that took over the whole tree and the very top of it was just a massive cluster of all the fine and we cut it down finally one year and now we've we've trained these vines to go off in other directions actually going to walk underneath them here in a minute but now you've still got room for all the wizards to roam around you'll see a lot of time was exploding around them and the birds of course going down to hang out just a good spot i guess for all the animals even the plants in here out because like i said this is this is i mean i can't imagine a lot survived in here after the fire even though the structure wasn't ruined i'm sure a lot of the other animals or plants and stuff in here was probably burned out male if you die another want to take it spot right so you only find there's only going to be one real right right and you may or may not find it and you see a lot of this room up stairs to you so you get rid of a couple of different views of it really big into just rocks minerals gemstones fossils and all that stuff and we wanted to incorporate that into the play so that's why it is rule was that we had to be real nice precious gems and minerals in the so even the people that are new to the reptiles they come out and they still get something out of the rocks or if you're not into rocks and reptiles then get the people that like the plants in the bunch or the birds appeal to you know to the other crowd aren't the other things yard and right now there's two legs of it coming off of the main branch and that's what we're actually scanning underneath but it used to climb up the pine scale it's in here and so big and people always thought it was actually a tree and when you told them that it was a pole going to be a fine they never believed it because when they're used to seeing bogan the vines in their yards it's never something quite that green but well and what if they eat mostly birds in nature and so to get through the thick layer of feathers they mostly your bird eating snakes have really large little capsules and then i think we sell them for seventy five cents don't do a lot of personal tour if there's like school groups that come out in the fall and spring that's when we get most of them and if it's a slow day i don't mind spending extra time with them all and will follow them around the building or around the grounds a him a little bit extra attention but i think it's funny that he said that i wonder how many people actually just don't even really notice a lot of the skeleton exhibits that we have most of the people are probably looking for s and now we're joined also with your children yeah my daughter tiffany and then my son jack over here and what do you guys think about this whole place and i'm guessing maybe from an early childhood she's been coming here if you should wish she's been coming here probably from the very first day yeah i can't remember exactly when we had her coming out but i'm sure she was here when she was less than one and so you have how many shows a day for crocodiles there would be a year five alligator shows five snake shows and i think four birds shows is the way they have a strong out this time of year still have them out like in the later summer in the early spring but it doesn't keep up with like the really low temperatures that we're going to start getting like it's you know end of october while we're still open so we can have a map you can show that  from your son in a moment but also about the some of the prairie dog and what happened ok this this period on town was probably built in like zero six the original one when i started here was up by the giant tortoises and in ninety seven we started finding prairie dogs in the flower beds and just hopping around grounds and we found out that they had dug underneath the original wall and so we had to modify the way we built it this one's built  lot deeper and with concrete to more of that rather than just chicken wire and fencing so hopefully these guys will get out like how many acres altogether out here i don't even know and we will end with kweisi a sixty year old tortoise is telling us a little bit about kweisi and the reptile guards a very interesting place if you find yourself out this way learn more about this family and adult friendly attraction that is on your way to mt rushmore and their crazy horse memorial please visit reptile gardens dot com well in sturgis camping competitions provided by j l and owner of the broken spoke saloon and campground learn more about all the various entertainment bands and camping facilities at broken spoke campground dot com please be sure to visit my website adventure t v dot  regular updates information flix and as always thank you for watching it didn't your t v thanks for tuning in the first half is being repeated from a few weeks back i made a little miscalculation in my airing of footage so i only try to keep family oriented episodes of sturgis with them which oriented episodes so the second half is also part of our time at the reptile gardens sometimes if the programs are not turned in ninety six hours prior to their air date they will not air station people see other community colleges who have taken over did a operation have decided that it will be strictly adhered to even though they really don't need ninety six hours to get a program on the air they can actually do it in just a few hours i know this but they are demanding ninety six hours they're also demanding a fee for every program so i have to pay a fee for this program to be on the air every week and i have to pay a fee for the cultural festivals programme to be on the air every week this is very different from before and i'm not sure what the money's going to be because now they're outsourcing the day to day operation to archive dot com so that we have to be responsible for our own uploads and it's really really screwed up and they're still running repeats from may and june of two thousand and eleven so hopefully the viewers who actually enjoy my program are still continuing to tune in i hope to maybe get back to saturdays at ten pm i don't know if that's going to happen or not we continue our visit to the family friendly reptile gardens then it's back to sturgis if i were to get bit even a couple of times they would be forgiving about that but i'm if it keeps happening in you you're doing it to be show off and show off i'm sure that would be grounds for fire and actually we're going to so as we continue on the road a little wet and kind of clearing up a little and as we go up the next hill work you're actually going to see a couple of attractions that are in this area that are kind of often forgotten about during really week one of them being  as i was talking about rapid city money from the rally well early days of rapid city also has a lot of stuff going on as well to learn more about this family and adult friendly attraction that is on your way to mt rushmore and their crazy horse memorial please visit reptile gardens dot com while in sturgis camping competitions provided by j l and owner of the broken spoke saloon and campground learn more about all the various entertainment bans and camping facilities at broken spoke campground dot com please be sure to visit my web site adventure t v dot