If you find yourself with time to kill waiting for a cave tour at Jewel Cave, explore the surface with a hike along the Canyons Trail/NPS

Finding myself with several hours to kill before my tour of Jewel Cave, I took a hike. It's something you might keep in mind when you visit Jewel Cave National Monument in South Dakota.

It's not unusual to have to wait for your scheduled hike of Jewel Cave. The Scenic Tour is the main walk through the cave, and folks hoping to take it often lineup at the visitor center before it opens at 8 a.m. so they can buy a ticket for the tour of their choice. While I was there early, mid-morning tours were sold out to school groups and my tour wasn't leaving until 12:40 p.m.

So I looked around, noticed a sign pointing to a trail, and headed down the trail. 

Called the "Canyons" Trail, it wasn't filled with a lot of up-and-down as that name might suggest. However, it does take you through the bottom of Lithograph Canyon and up through Hell Canyon.

The Canyons Trail at Jewel Cave National Monument starts out in Ponderosa pine forest/Kurt Repanshek

Since the park's visitor center is on a high point, the trail starts off downhill. You can extend the 3.5-mile distance a bit by walking the quarter-mile Roof Trail, a loop, before heading down. But the main attraction is the Canyons Trail, which zigzags down the mountainside through Ponderosa pine forest to reach the floor of Lithograph Canyon.

At the bottom, the trail follows a single-track gravel and dirt road along the forest floor between ridgelines. The forest is soon lost and the landscape turns to meadow...in part due to a fire that burned through the area in recent years, leaving behind downed and standing snags.

My visit to Jewel Cave was in late May, and blooming along the road were patches of gorgeous Rocky Mountain iris. Curiously, they were restricted to the road; no irises were out in the meadow proper. Out of sight, but within hearing, were woodpeckers rapping away at the dead trees in search of insects. Northern flickers were raucous with their calls, while goldfinches and cliff swallows swooped about me.

In late May, blooms of Rocky Mountain iris color the meadows the trail meanders through/Kurt Repanshek

Coming around a point of rock, I was scolded by a yellow-bellied marmot that darted out of sight before I could spot him.

There are a couple nice payoffs to this hike:

* As you start climbing off the forest floor and towards the top of Hell Canyon, you pass the historic entrance to the cave. On a hot summer day, this is a great place to be, as the air coming out is about 49 degrees and feels like air conditioning.

* After ascending a steep set of stone stairs the Civilian Conservation Corps installed, you'll come upon a cabin the CCC crew built in 1936. There's a picnic table and water fountain here, making it a pretty good spot to stop for lunch. The CCC crew came over from Wind Cave National Park in May 1935, and built the camp and a surrounding camp, which stayed operational until September 1939.

After leaving the cabin, keep a close eye on the trail signs. I missed one and bushwacked uphill until I picked the trail up again. It led a short distance back to the Roof Trail and the visitor center.

All-in-all, a nice two-hour hike that got me back in time to cool off during my cave tour in the 49-degree air of Jewel Cave.

Heading back towards the visitor center the trail leads you past the historic entrance to Jewel Cave and..../Kurt Repanshek

...a cabin the Civilian Conservation Corps built in 1936/Kurt Repanshek