Custer State Park is one of the most beloved and diverse parks in the U. S. featuring breathtaking natural scenery, diverse wildlife and a wide range of outdoor activities.
Composed of one of the oldest and most diverse geologic foundations in America that makes for hairpin curves and tunnels which you can follow for 22 kilometres along Needles Highway, Custer State Park is as much a natural treasure as any lands that make up America’s national parks. And you will no doubt eventually wonder why this spectacular landscape hasn’t been declared as one.
Don’t worry about it: South Dakotans are perfectly content to manage it themselves and a great job they do indeed, with fine roads and an excellent tourism infrastructure. No matter the park’s official status – a few days or a week in and around these 28,732 hectares promise to reveal one adventure after another.
Within the southern part of the Black Hills National Forest, the town of Custer serves as a gateway to the state park that lies just a few kilometres to the east. As your base, book yourself into the cute, family-run Bavarian Inn in the hills just outside of town. Another of all things named for the notorious commander around here, The Custer Wolf is a locally popular casual pub restaurant.
Strolling Mount Rushmore Road – effectively Custer’s main street whose broad width was designed to allow oxen freight carts to turn around – you’ll delight in the town’s many fun and quirky brightly painted buffalo statues.
Also there, Keely and Damien Mahony operate the Black Hills Balloons adventure outfit. The American wife and Irish husband’s crew will take you on a short, early-morning drive to a forest clearing while you watch the balloons get filled in anticipation of the launch of your hour-long flight. Below you, Black Hills ridges and valleys are filled with ponderosa pine as fog swirls around rock spires and rises from the surface of forest ponds below.
After your flight, you’ll be ready for a hearty breakfast at Baker’s Bakery & Café hash house whose tagline – You’ll Love Our Buns – is placed under a cheeky logo of a waitress with baked buns peeking out from her skirt.
For lunch or dinner, the Pounding Fathers Restaurant/Mt. Rushmore Brewing Company is the place to sample some of the dozens of Dakota state beers on draft. So massive is the complex, that you could get lost there after knocking back a few (opened seasonally from May through October).
Just north of the Custer State Park boundaries book ahead for the super-popular 1880 Train that runs between the towns of Hill City and Keystone. You’ll think that you’re in an Old West movie when, at one point, the vintage train creates a steamy scene by blasting sand through the flues to clear soot, and whenever the tracks curve over the one-hour journey and one can spot the engine chugging along. Conductors with old-timey facial hair help set the mood.
Anyone whose route ends in Keystone certainly needs no introduction to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, which lies minutes away.
Seemingly content with the superb vantage point from the Grand View Terrace, the vast majority of park-goers don’t follow the half-mile-long looping Presidential Trail whose wooden stairs drop and rise again and get you right below the talus slope. Instead, they take in the extensive displays in the visitor’s centre. You’ll have a close-up of the presidents all to yourself at various viewing platforms to suss out just where Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint dangled from and scampered down those granite faces.
Head west back to the town of Hill City, stop and sample what at Prairie Berry Winery will surely be your most unusual wine tasting ever – that is, unless you have already tasted rhubarb wine or their raspberry-inflected Red Ass Rhubarb blend. They have a brew pub as well for that mango IPA you never knew you wanted.
Taking up a huge house that you wish you could live in, Hill City’s Alpine Inn restaurant was built in 1884 as a hotel serving the mining and railroad companies. The lunch menu is ample but, for dinner, it’s just two sizes of filet mignon or spaetzle primavera followed by a massive homemade dessert selection. It’s cash-only and it’s wildly popular.
A massive site off of the highway between Hill City and Custer, The Crazy Horse Memorial mountain carving is a truly odd slice of Americana. Still far from completion since sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began blasting rock away in 1948, the work depicts the warrior whom Oglala Lakota people knew as Tasunke Witko, famous for his role in the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn. Funded by donations and entry fees and finally advancing quickly with newer rock-carving technologies, the memorial now includes the chief’s hand pointing in the distance, to go along with his long-ago finished head.
The memorial museum is filled with artifacts and art from many Indian nations across the continent. One wall display that you might not expect is made up of small, early 20th-century advertising illustrations of romanticized Indian and Western figures and scenes that were made for a gum company by Winfried Reiss, a German-born artist recently rediscovered for his murals in the Empire State Building and Harlem Renaissance portraits.
Rapid City is now well-known for its nearly life-sized bronze statues of presidents around town. Back in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) – an American New Deal agency – erected a truly delightful curiosity on a hill outside of town where the life-sized concrete creatures in Dinosaur Park have fared remarkably well in the near-century of their existence. You can expect the unexpected in this southwest corner of South Dakota.
Custer Park offers a unique and unforgettable experience. I hope that this guide helps you plan your adventure and that you’ll soon discover the magic of this park.
Worth Pondering…
Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam,
Where the Deer and the Antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not cloudy all day.
—Dr. Brewster Higley (1876)