Custer, South Dakota has bison, caves, and a mountain still being carved by hand

Custer’s got bison, caves and carved mountains

You could spend a week in Custer, South Dakota, and still not see everything within 30 minutes of your hotel.

The town itself is small, about 2,000 people living in the southern Black Hills, but what surrounds it reads like a greatest-hits list of the American West. Bison herds.

Ancient caves. A mountain face still being carved by hand.

The gold rush put Custer on the map 150 years ago, and the geology has been keeping it there ever since.

Gold, a picket rope and a pocket compass

Custer is the oldest European American settlement in the Black Hills, and it started with a single prospector finding gold in French Creek.

Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led more than 1,000 men into the Black Hills in 1874, and when his expedition’s prospector, Horatio N. Ross, spotted gold, everything moved fast.

A surveyor named Thomas Hooper laid out the town on Aug. 10, 1875, using a picket rope and a pocket compass. Union Army veterans wanted to name it Custer.

Confederate veterans pushed for Stonewall. Custer won.

From 10,000 people to a ghost town in weeks

By May 1876, roughly 10,000 people had poured into town chasing that same gold. Then word came that a bigger strike had hit Deadwood Gulch, about 50 miles north.

The town emptied almost overnight. What you walk through today on Mount Rushmore Road carries more than 140 years of history in its bones, including streets built 100 feet wide so ox-drawn freight wagons could make full U-turns.

That’s not a design quirk. That’s a working frontier town that never forgot where it came from.

71,000 acres of bison, pine and open prairie

Custer State Park covers 71,000 acres of rolling grassland, pine forest and granite peaks, making it one of the largest state parks in the country.

About 1,300 bison roam free across the park, along with pronghorn, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, deer, coyotes and prairie dogs. The park entrance runs $20 per vehicle and gets you in for up to seven days.

People who have visited both this park and several national parks say the wildlife density here matches anything they’ve seen in a federally managed area.

Donkeys that will stick their heads in your window

The 18-mile Wildlife Loop cuts through the southern half of Custer State Park, and you can cover the whole drive in about an hour and a half.

Go early in the morning or around dusk and you’ll catch most of the big animals moving. But the strangest moment on this road comes from the burros.

These are wild donkeys that descended from pack animals used by Black Hills miners, and they’ve figured out that cars mean snacks. They walk right up to your window and wait.

The park doesn’t discourage it.

The road engineers said couldn’t be built

Needles Highway runs 14 miles through a forest of narrow granite spires that rise straight out of the hillsides.

Former South Dakota Gov. Peter Norbeck planned the route himself, on foot and on horseback, before construction wrapped in 1922. Engineers had told him it couldn’t be done.

The road threads through two one-lane tunnels cut directly through solid rock, and at one point passes a formation called the Needle’s Eye, a gap in the granite that looks like something pulled from the rock with a giant sewing needle.

The highway closes after the first snowfall of the season.

The highest peak east of the Rockies

At the top of Needles Highway sits Sylvan Lake, ringed by smooth granite boulders and considered the most photographed lake in South Dakota.

From the trailhead at the lake, you can hike to the summit of Black Elk Peak, the highest point in South Dakota at 7,242 feet. It’s also the highest summit in the entire United States east of the Rocky Mountains.

At the top, a stone fire lookout tower built in the 1930s still stands. The peak was renamed from Harney Peak in 2016 to honor Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man.

Three tunnels that frame Mount Rushmore perfectly

Iron Mountain Road connects Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore in 18 miles of tight curves, steep switchbacks and narrow bridges.

There are 314 curves, 14 switchbacks and three pigtail bridges that spiral the road over itself. Three stone tunnels line up with Mount Rushmore in the distance, framing the carved faces like a photograph.

Gov. Norbeck oversaw this road too, and he was direct about how to drive it. He said the road was not a highway and should be taken at no more than 20 mph.

He wasn’t wrong.

563 feet tall and still not finished after 76 years

About five miles north of Custer, crews have been carving a mountain since 1948.

The Crazy Horse Memorial began when Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear commissioned sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to build a monument to the Oglala Lakota leader. The first blast on the mountain happened on June 3, 1948.

The 87.5-foot face was completed in 1998. When the full sculpture is finished, it will stand 563 feet high and stretch 641 feet across.

It has never taken a dollar of government funding. The site also holds the Indian Museum of North America.

The first cave in the world with national park status

Wind Cave National Park sits just south of Custer State Park, and in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt made it the first cave anywhere in the world to receive national park status.

Over 168 miles of passages have been mapped inside, and the cave holds the world’s largest concentration of boxwork, a rare honeycomb-shaped calcite formation that looks like it was pressed out of the rock with a waffle iron.

Above ground, the park protects nearly 34,000 acres of mixed-grass prairie and a genetically pure bison herd.

Over 220 miles underground and scientists think there’s more

About 13 miles west of Custer, Jewel Cave National Monument ranks as the fifth-longest cave in the world, with more than 220 miles of mapped passages. The only U.S. cave longer is Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

Two brothers discovered it in 1900 and named it for the glittering calcite crystals covering the walls. Roosevelt designated it a national monument in 1908.

The National Park Service runs guided tours, including one by historic lantern light. Wind Cave and Jewel Cave sit about 30 minutes apart, and researchers still don’t know if they connect underground.

When 1,300 bison move at once, you feel it in your chest

Every year on the last Friday of September, about 60 cowboys and cowgirls on horseback drive the entire bison herd at Custer State Park into corrals.

The Buffalo Roundup draws thousands of spectators, and if you get a spot along the viewing area, the ground shakes when the herd runs.

The roundup serves a practical purpose: it lets park staff check the animals’ health and manage herd size. An arts festival runs alongside it all weekend.

It’s one of the most attended events in the state and is worth planning a trip around.

Plan your trip to Custer, South Dakota

The closest major airport to Custer is in Rapid City, about 50 miles northeast. From there, take US Highway 16 or US Highway 385 straight into town.

Custer State Park charges $20 per vehicle for a pass good for seven days.

Cave tours at both Wind Cave and Jewel Cave fill up fast, so book them in advance through the official Recreation. gov website.

Go in September for the Buffalo Roundup, but book your lodging months ahead since the whole area sells out that weekend.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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