This post is Part 2 of my North and South Dakota road trip. Read Part 1 here.

Felix and I stayed overnight in a tiny town near the north edge of South Dakota. The next morning we drove south towards the Black Hills. We made a quick stop at a historic fish hatchery in the town of Spearfish. I learned that the streams of the Black Hills are ideal for trout but don’t have any naturally, so people breed them and stock the streams. You know I can’t resist a stop to look at fishies. 

Next we drove to the town of Deadwood, and immediately saw a group of bighorn sheep walking in the road and causing a small traffic jam. 

We went to a museum about the history of Deadwood. The town started as a mining hub when gold was found in the Black Hills, and became known for having a history of rough and tumble cowboys and outlaws.

We walked the main street, which was packed with casinos, saloons, and gift shops. Deadwood was declared a historic place and the state legalized gambling in the town for the sake of historic preservation. It wasn’t a super interesting stop for me, but it was a good place to sport my new cowboy hat.

Next we drove to Custer State Park and stopped at the Sylvan Lake Lodge for lunch. It was fancy and awkwardly empty.

Our first hike of the day was the Little Devil’s Tower trail. It’s a 3-mile hike and had some great views of meadows and the granite spires that dot the black hills. 

The top part of the hike is a scramble up one of said granite spires, which was pretty spooky. The view at the top was amazing. We could see a spiky rock formation called the Cathedral Spires, and Black Elk Peak, the highest point in the Black Hills. 

Felix suggested we do a stacks photo at the peak. Always plotting how to freak out my mom. 

Next we hiked a 1-mile loop around Sylvan Lake, a man-made lake that is considered the crown-jewel of Custer State Park. It is a really picturesque lake. It seems to be a hotspot for locals as you can go boating, fishing, and swimming in the lake. We considered going swimming but it was a bit too cold.  

We had some extra time at the end of the day so we decided to go a bit out of our way to drive the Needles Highway, which is a scenic road that has great views of the granite spires known as the Needles. The road is super windy and at certain points goes through narrow tunnels blasted out of the rock. 

As we came out of the mountains, we saw a bison right by the road. Felix said it looked right at him and saw into his soul. 

We stayed overnight in the town of Custer, and the next morning, we set out to drive the Wildlife Loop in Custer State Park. We stopped at the visitor center first, and they have a map of the park that shows where the bison herds currently are. We came across a herd almost immediately upon turning onto the Wildlife Loop Road. 

The rest of the loop was not as exciting. We passed some prairie dog towns but didn’t bother stopping because we’d seen enough of them. We passed some feral donkeys that were being swarmed by tourists petting and feeding them. It’s so hard to resist petting the bison, people had to get that out somewhere. At one point I spotted some pronghorn antelope, which we learned are the fastest land animal in the western hemisphere. They have cool looking antlers, but were too far away to get a good photo.

We finished the loop and drove out of Custer towards our next National Park: Wind Cave! Wind Cave is in a mixed prairie environment, which has more hills than the true prairie but is mostly grassland with some trees. I didn’t get any pictures of it, but it looks just like the wildlife loop area of Custer (pictured above). It’s not a super exciting landscape after seeing the badlands and the Black Hills. We did pass some prairie dog towns and probably a dozen bison on our way to the visitor center. There are some hiking trails in the park but based on my research, they didn’t seem worth doing.

We arrived early for our 1 o clock cave tour so we looked around at the exhibits in the visitor center. The park offers three different tours of the cave and I picked the Fairgrounds Tour because it was noted as being the most strenuous. This turned out to not mean much as our tour group included seniors and toddlers. 

We descended into the cave through an elevator, which took a while as our 40-person tour group had to go down in groups of 8. The whole tour was pretty slow moving. Wind Cave is known for a formation called boxwork, which is almost exclusively found in this cave. The cave doesn’t have many stalactites or stalagmites because not much water gets in. 

The tour was ok. Besides the boxwork, there wasn’t a lot to see in the cave. I think I would have been more impressed if I hadn’t already seen some other amazing caves, like Carlsbad. We passed by two people who were preparing to do a Wild Cave Tour, where you squeeze through tight spaces and crawl through the cave. I recalled when booking my tour that the Wild Cave Tour wasn’t currently being offered, but they said they had to call to get a reservation. I was very jealous. 

After the tour, we stopped by the cave’s natural entrance, which is a small hole in the ground where wind blows in and out of the cave. This little hole is the largest entrance to the cave that was ever found. We learned on the tour that this is a sacred place to the Lakota because their creation story says that their people lived underground in the cave and then emerged to earth through this hole, which then shrunk so they couldn’t return underground. 

Unfortunately, I must report that Wind Cave is a pretty low-tier national park for me. Its two main attractions, the cave and the wildlife, might’ve both been more exciting if I had not already experienced them in other parks.

Our final stop in the Black Hills was Mount Rushmore. I wasn’t super excited to see this, but it seemed like a necessary stop on our Dakota’s road trip. 

I don’t think it’s “cool” to like Mount Rushmore because it’s a bunch of white guys’ faces blasted into sacred hills taken from indigenous people, but as I looked at the exhibits and learned about the construction of the monument, I begrudgingly acknowledged that it’s a pretty amazing feat of engineering. I liked learning about how they used a pointing machine to scale the dimensions of the model into the mountain, and how they had to modify the design as they progressed based on the rock conditions they found. 

The one thing I didn’t like about Mount Rushmore is that I couldn’t use my National Parks pass to get in because their parking lot is run by a vendor, not the National Parks Service 😡. My longtime readers know how much I love using my National Parks Pass.

We headed out of the Black Hills, stopped for dinner in Rapid City, and then drove to the town of Wall, SD, which would be our home base for our final National Park of the trip: Badlands.

Read Part 3 here!