Custer State Park and Iconic Drives

On Thursday, our fourth full day in South Dakota, we decided to first drive through Custer State Park, Then take a couple of the iconic drives around the area.

Since the is was the last full day in South Dakota, we slept in a little later than we had been. We got a few things together, the usual cameras, and we ate the donuts we got at Wall Drug for breakfast before heading out.

The park has a fee to enter, which is good for 7 days, and costs 20 or 30 bucks. The pass is nice to get right off the bat, since as you drive around the area, you could possibly go in and out of the park frequently. We got our sticker, still on the Bronco, and started off on about a half hour drive to the Wildlife Loop. It’s a pretty cool drive up and down a few mountains and through the woods, which are is some places totally destroyed either by fires or bugs. Some areas throughout the Black Hills are pretty sad looking because of this, a lot of mountain tops are just stumps and fallen trees.

We came up on a pretty large herd of buffalo shortly after starting the loop. There were many cars stopped on both sides of the road to see them. We slowly moved passed them, giving Kacie lots of time to snap photos.

As we’ve said before, we were in town at a good time since there were quite a few babies running around here too.

Having seen this herd and the heard we had seen the day before at the Badlands, I have no doubt one of these buffalos was the 1000th we’d seen in the past two days. I feel like that’s a lot of buffalo that not everyone gets to see when they come out here. Having said that, we had seen, and Kacie had taken photos of, enough buffalo now. We drove off, catching another couple stranglers drinking at a creek shortly after the original herd, and heading to find the gravel and dirt, less traveled roads.

Except for the Wildlife Loop, at lot of the roads running throughout the park are gravel. They are well maintained, so you would be fine to drive it in a car, although it’s nice to have a little clearance in some spots. We zig-zagged through the park for the next couple hours, periodically seeing various wildlife.

The prairie dogs are everywhere with flat land, and a lot of the these flat spots are where the roads are. Many times you will look around and find that you are surrounded by prairie dog towns, most times hearing their little barks as you drive by. At one of these spots that we had stopped, all of a sudden an antelope hopped up out of the field and made his way across the road in front of us. He was cool to see, and wasn’t very scared of the Bronco, so he hung out for a minute after he crossed.

We popped back onto the Wildlife Loop at a little visitor station and ran in to check it out. It wasn’t anything special and pretty small, but it did have some info about the park at this time of year that was interesting. Which animals were where and what they were doing, that kind of thing. We hopped back onto the main road and heading out the park.

We exited Custer State Park close to the bottom of one of the iconic drives in the Black Hills. Iron Mountain Road runs north to south from Mount Rushmore to Custer State Park… roughly. It’s big with bikers since it has many interesting features and views. They love to advertise it as:

17 MILES

314 CURVES

14 SWITCHBACKS

3 PIGTAILS

3 TUNNELS

4 PRESIDENTS

2 SPLITS

I think I got a t-shirt that says that… I took maybe an hour to make our way north on Iron Mountain Road. We drove around all the corners and through the tunnels, only really stopping once to get a few shots of Mount Rushmore from one of the high points of the road.

As we came to the end of Iron Mountain Road, which is right down the road from the Mount Rushmore entrance, we found a cool little place to get some lunch in a little tourist trap of a town that I don’t remember the name of. It was at the end of a little strip mall of souvenir shops, and had a little place for a couple tables outside. We sat inside. Kacie got a BLT with curds and I got another buffalo burger with fries. We shared. The buffalo burger was way better than the one I had the day before. You could tell they had just formed it before cooking it for me. It was good. It was all good, and the lady that ran it was very nice. As we left she told us a story about a buffalo ripping a lady’s pants off. Before we left we had to wonder up the strip mall and buy too many t-shirts and stickers at the various little shops.

Eventuall we hopped back in the Bronco and found our way to the north end of Needles Highway, back in Custer State Park. Coming in to the beginning of the next iconic route, we first stopped at Sylvan Lake and took a look around. It’s a picturesque mountain lake, but it’s a tourist trap. There were people all over the place and it was chilly by the lake. So we took a look around and checked out the cool rock outcropping around it before heading back to the car.

Needles Highway is known for cutting through jagged, needle-like vertical rock outcroppings and tunnels. Again, we hit all the spots. There’s only one road and everybody takes it. This one was a lot more crowded than Iron Mountain. As Kacie skillfully drove through the hills, she had to navigate countless people parked on the side of the road, and wondering around almost aimlessly, in whatever direction makes the least sense. In one of the more congested switchbacks, we heard what we at first thought was a child wailing in the back of a car. As we discussed it as we made our way past where the car was parked, we think it might have actually been a teen or adult. It’s not a pleasant sound, you can hear it in the video.

Other than dodging a few people, it is a beautiful drive. You get really close to the rock walls driving through some of these tunnels, although there were quite a few vehicles a lot wider than us going through. A few I’d be worried about if I was driving. The terrain is otherworldly, and you drive right through the really cool looking parts. Toward the end of this one, we did start looking for trails off the main road, but everything was private or no motor vehicles.

It was late afternoon before we turned off of Needles Highway, so we decided to just head back to the house. On the way, we figured we’d hit the mini gold course down the road a bit from where we were staying. It was quite a challenging course, but not difficult in appreance. Difficult because there were no flat spots, on any surface, on any of the holes. If you could get your ball to stop rolling when you put it down to take your first putt, then all bets were off, no matter which direction or strength you hit the ball. We did keep score, but were both far over par. But it was fun to just play for a bit. It was a quick course to get through, even with that many strokes, so we finally headed to the house.

It had been a long week, so we figured on some comfort food tonight. Pizza Hut. And there was one right in town on the main street through town. They even had a drive through window, although when we pulled up the guy seemed confused and scared. I believe he had a tenuous grasp of the English language and didn’t know what to say. So he told us to come back in ten minutes… So we parked down the street and Kacie went in to get it. It was ready as soon as she waked in, although it was under something like “Cassie”. We also had a few apps at home we had bought earlier in the week. It was all delicious and filling. After that we washed up, watched some Wednesday on Netflix and passed out. The next morning we had to pack up and head home.