Last Updated: September 14, 2026
Two facts sit inside a twenty-mile circle here. The town is named after the officer whose 1874 expedition found gold in these hills and broke the treaty that guaranteed them to the Lakota. And the cave south of it is where, in the Lakota account, people came into the world. You can drive between the two in half an hour.
We based ourselves in Custer in the spring of 2022, coming west from the Badlands. We had been through the Black Hills once before, in 2018, so this time we skipped what we had already done — Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, Sturgis, Iron Mountain Road — and went to the things we had missed. Which turned out to be the better half.
Visitor Information
Custer, South Dakota sits on US 16/385 in the southern Black Hills, about forty miles southwest of Rapid City and an hour and a half west of the Badlands. Custer State Park requires a park entrance license, sold per vehicle and valid for several days; the Wildlife Loop Road is eighteen miles of paved road and is where the animals are. Wind Cave National Park has no entrance fee for the surface, but every cave tour is ticketed and guided, and tickets are first-come at the visitor center — get there early in summer. The Needles Highway (Highway 87) and Iron Mountain Road both close in winter and both have one-lane granite tunnels; check the posted clearances before you take anything large through, and do not attempt either with a trailer. Current conditions: nps.gov/wica and Custer State Park.
Custer
Custer is the highest incorporated town in South Dakota at 5,315 feet, which it wins by nineteen feet over Lead, and about 1,900 people live here. It was the first town in the Black Hills, thrown up by prospectors in 1875 after Custer’s expedition reported gold on French Creek the summer before. They originally called it Stonewall, after the Confederate general, and renamed it for Custer soon after. That is two towns running in this blog founded under a name that did not stick — Interior in the Badlands was called Black until 1893 — and in both cases the second name is the one that tells you what happened.
The elevation is also why people here claim the mildest weather in the state, which is not quite the boast it sounds. The Black Hills sit high enough to take the edge off the summer heat that flattens the plains, and they catch enough chinook wind off the Rockies to run warmer in winter than open country two hours east. It is a genuinely pleasant place to be in late spring.
The main street is three blocks of shops, bars and restaurants and it is worth walking. Among the things we found: a taxidermy raccoon holding a paddle in a canoe with a beaver and a skunk, a life-size plastic pig, a pickup selling shed antlers by the pound out of the bed, and a cafe sign about its buns. Shed antlers are legal to collect and sell off national forest land in South Dakota, which is why they turn up as a truck-bed business every spring.
Lunch at the Custer Wolf after a morning underground, and the name is not decoration. The Custer Wolf was a real animal that killed livestock across roughly three hundred square miles of this country between 1911 and 1920, ran up an estimated $25,000 in damage, and had a bounty on it that climbed from $100 to $500 — ten times the going rate for a wolf. Local accounts made it a monster: a wolf-cougar cross, a creature taking revenge for its dead family, “the master criminal of the animal world”. The federal hunter H. P. Williams arrived in April 1920 and it took him seven months to kill it. The autopsy found a normal gray wolf, ninety-eight pounds, just over six feet nose to tail, gone white with age. Williams said afterward it was the hardest hunt of his life.
And this, on the roadside at Pringle, about fifteen miles south — a tower of scrap bicycles welded together that has been growing by donation for years.
Sunset RV Park, Custer
Fifty-amp service, good water pressure, sewer and WiFi fast enough to stream. Nine sites, well kept, ours private and in the trees, and far enough off the highway that we could not hear it. The owners, Tami and Bill, are generous with suggestions about what to see. Sunset RV Park is two miles from downtown Custer.
Ȟe Sápa: Why These Hills Are Contested
It is difficult to write about this place honestly without the treaty, so here it is once, plainly, and then we will go and look at the animals.
The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, the Black Hills included, for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the Lakota, and specified that no further cession of any part of it would be valid without the signatures of three-quarters of the adult men living there. Six years later Custer took a column of the Seventh Cavalry into the Hills, reported gold, and the reports circulated widely enough to produce an immediate public demand that the country be opened. Prospectors came in illegally; Custer, the town, is one of the places they stopped.
After the Great Sioux War and the Little Bighorn, Congress in August 1876 cut off the food appropriations the reservation depended on unless the Black Hills were ceded. A commission took a document around under those conditions and got a small fraction of the required signatures. An act of Congress took the Hills in 1877.
The case ran for a century. In 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the Supreme Court found against the government with a single dissent, holding that the taking was a Fifth Amendment taking requiring just compensation, and affirmed an award of about $105 million — $17.1 million as the 1877 value of the land, $450,000 for gold removed before then, and $88 million in interest. The Sioux have never taken the money, because accepting payment would settle the claim and concede the sale. The fund has stayed in the Treasury earning interest and had passed a billion dollars by 2011. It is still there.
Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial are both carved into this ground and we covered them in 2018, so they are not repeated here.
Custer State Park
Seventy-one thousand acres, established in 1912, and largely the work of one man. Peter Norbeck was a well driller who became governor of South Dakota in 1917 and then a US senator for fifteen years, and almost everything in this post traces back to him: he built Custer State Park, laid out the Needles Highway and Iron Mountain Road, pushed for Sylvan Lake, argued for Wind Cave and the Badlands, and was the political patron who got Mount Rushmore funded. If the southern Black Hills feel designed, it is because they were.
The bison herd runs to about a thousand through the winter and builds to roughly 1,400 by the autumn, which is when the park holds its Buffalo Roundup — riders drive the whole herd in over a morning, the animals are checked and sorted, and surplus stock goes to auction. It has run every year since 1965 and now draws fifteen to twenty thousand spectators. We were there in calving season instead, which is quieter and better: the calves are orange, unsteady, and only weeks old.
A coyote working a field at distance. They eat mostly small mammals, and in a park with prairie dog towns this size they do well.
The prairie dog towns kept Jake fully occupied. We watched a badger digging into one and never got the camera onto it — badgers are the reason prairie dogs post sentries, and they excavate with a speed that has to be seen.
Turkeys, and these are worth a second look, because there were no turkeys in the Black Hills. Merriam’s wild turkeys were brought in from New Mexico in three small shipments — eight birds in 1948, fifteen in 1950, six in 1951. Twenty-nine birds. Every turkey in these hills descends from them, and they are now common enough to be a nuisance in some campgrounds.
Pronghorn were visible all over the park, as they were in the Badlands. They sprint at close to sixty miles an hour and can hold around fifty-five over open ground, which is faster than any predator that currently exists here needs them to be — the usual explanation is that they are still outrunning the American cheetah, gone about twelve thousand years.
Mountain bluebirds on a barbed wire fence. This is the western bird, blue all over with no rust on the breast at all, and unlike most thrushes it hunts by hovering over grass and dropping on insects. The fence is doing real work in that photograph: mountain bluebirds are cavity nesters that lost most of their nest sites to logging and fire suppression, and fence-line nest box programs across the northern Rockies are a good part of why they are still common.
And these three ewes are the best story in the park. Bighorn were native here and were gone by the 1950s. The park brought eight in from Alberta in 1922 and that herd held on for three decades before dying out for reasons nobody established. Twenty more came from Alberta in 1999 and built the herd to roughly two hundred — and then in 2004 and 2005 an all-age pneumonia die-off, the kind driven by Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae picked up from domestic sheep, killed about ninety percent of them. In 2018 the park restocked with twelve bighorn brought over from Badlands National Park.
Which closes a circle. The Badlands had no sheep at all for forty years, and the animals there today descend from twenty-two Rocky Mountain bighorn trucked in from Pike’s Peak, Colorado, in 1964. So the ewes in this photograph are the great-granddaughters of Colorado sheep, by way of the Badlands, standing in a herd that has now been rebuilt three separate times in a century. We saw a handful of females and no rams.
A red-winged blackbird holding a cattail. The red epaulettes are switchable — a male can cover them almost completely or flare them, and he does the second only on his own territory.
White-tailed deer, and worth noting against the Badlands post: the deer there were mule deer, all ears and bouncing off four feet at once. These are whitetails, which run rather than stot and flag that tail going away. The Black Hills hold both, with whitetails in the wetter draws and mule deer on the open slopes.
Sylvan Lake is artificial and it does not look it. A dam went across Sunday Gulch in 1881 and the granite came right down to the waterline, which is why it photographs the way it does. Norbeck brought it into the park and had the lodge built up the hill rather than on the shore, on the grounds that people come to look at the lake and you should not put a building in the view. The mile-long shoreline loop is easy and takes about half an hour.
Wind Cave National Park
Start with the hole. That is the natural entrance, and it is ten inches by fourteen — you could not get a child through it. Air moves in and out of it hard enough to take a hat off, because the cave breathes: when the barometric pressure outside falls below the pressure inside, air rushes out, and when it rises, air pours in. Tom and Jesse Bingham are credited with finding it in 1881 when the wind blew Tom’s hat off his head.
But the cave was known long before that. In Lakota tradition this is Washun Niya, the breathing hole — also given as Oniya Oshoka, the place where the earth breathes inside — and it is where the Lakota emerged into this world, led up by Tokahe, the first man. It is also, in the same body of tradition, where the buffalo came from. That is held knowledge belonging to a living people, and it is not ours to adjudicate; what can be said plainly is that this is a place of origin in Lakota belief, that it remains sacred, and that the Park Service now says so on its own signage.
Theodore Roosevelt made Wind Cave a national park on January 3, 1903 — the first cave anywhere in the world to be given that status, and the seventh national park in the United States. The original version of this post noted that no valuable minerals were ever found in the cave, and that is exactly the reason: there was nothing worth digging out, so the argument for protecting it was the cave itself, which in 1903 was a genuinely new kind of argument.
It is a dry cave, and that is the thing to understand about it. There is no dripping water, so there are almost no stalactites or stalagmites — none of what you get at Mammoth Cave or Marvel Cave. Instead the passages are densely packed into a small footprint: 168 miles of surveyed passage as of 2025, all of it inside about one square mile, which makes it the sixth longest cave in the world and the third longest in the United States, behind Mammoth Cave and Jewel Cave twenty miles up the road.
Boxwork, which is why you come. Those honeycomb fins are calcite that filled cracks in the limestone before the cave existed; when the rock around them dissolved away, the veins were left standing out in relief like the ribs of something. It is rare almost everywhere else on earth and ordinary here — Wind Cave contains something like ninety-five percent of all the boxwork ever found. The delicate needle-like growths in the same passages are frostwork.
We took the Garden of Eden and Natural Entrance tours, an hour each. Both are guided, both involve a lot of stairs, and the temperature underground sits around 54°F year-round, so take a layer. The signatures on that wall are from 1882 — a year after the Binghams found the entrance, and the kind of thing that would be vandalism today and is now protected as part of the record.
Needles Highway
Fourteen miles of Highway 87, and another of Norbeck’s. He walked and rode the route himself rather than letting engineers take the easy line, which is why it doubles back on itself the way it does — the road was laid out to reach the scenery rather than to get anywhere. The granite spires are the eroded roots of a batholith that pushed up into the Black Hills dome roughly 1.7 billion years ago, making this some of the oldest exposed rock in North America. The Badlands, a few stops behind us, were half a million years old.
The tunnels are the point at which people stop enjoying themselves. This one is just wide enough for a truck with the tow mirrors out. There are three on the road and the tightest is a shade over eight feet wide; the clearances are posted at both ends and they are not negotiable. Leave the trailer at the campground.
Hill City
Hill City has wineries, breweries and a good deal of tourist shopping. We had lunch and a tasting at Prairie Berry, which works largely with fruit rather than grapes — buffaloberry, chokecherry, rhubarb — because that is what grows at this altitude. The rhubarb one is better than it sounds.
What We Missed
Jewel Cave, which is a twenty-minute drive from Custer and is the third longest cave in the world, with over 220 miles surveyed and no realistic end in sight — explorers are still adding miles to it every year. We had Wind Cave booked and ran out of time. Next visit.
Crazy Horse we saw from a pull-off on the highway rather than going in, again for time. It has been under construction since 1948, it is privately funded and takes no federal money by choice, and it is nowhere near finished. Iron Mountain Road we drove in 2018, not this trip — the pigtail bridges and the tunnels cut to frame Rushmore are worth it, and they are also Norbeck’s.
Practical Tips
Drive the Wildlife Loop at dawn or in the last hour of light. Eighteen miles, paved, and in the middle of the day you will mostly see grass. Everything we photographed came from the early and late runs.
Book or queue for Wind Cave tours early. Every tour is guided and ticketed, numbers are capped, and in summer the day’s tickets can be gone by late morning. Take a jacket — it is 54°F down there whatever the surface is doing.
Do not tow anything onto the Needles Highway or Iron Mountain Road. The tunnels are single lane and genuinely tight. Unhitch, go in the truck, and enjoy it.
Custer is the right base for the southern Hills. Custer State Park, Wind Cave, Jewel Cave, the Needles and Crazy Horse are all inside half an hour. Rushmore, Hill City and Keystone are a little further; Deadwood and Sturgis are an hour and better served from the north.
Give the bison the road. They use it, they outweigh your vehicle, and in calving season the cows are short-tempered. Stop, wait, and do not get out.
Avoid the first full week of August. The Sturgis rally fills every bed and campsite in the region and moves prices accordingly. Late spring, which is when we went, is close to ideal — calves on the ground, everything green, and the roads open.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many days do you need in the Black Hills? Three to five for the highlights. A week lets you do Custer State Park properly at both ends of the day, take two cave tours, drive both scenic roads and still have time for Rushmore and Deadwood.
Is Wind Cave worth it if you have seen other caves? Yes, and especially if you have. It is a dry cave with almost no stalactites, so it looks nothing like Mammoth or Carlsbad, and the boxwork is effectively unavailable anywhere else on earth.
Wind Cave or Jewel Cave? Wind Cave for the boxwork and the history; Jewel Cave for scale and for the Scenic Tour, which is the more strenuous of the two. They are twenty minutes apart and doing both in a day is easy.
Where is the best wildlife viewing in Custer State Park? The Wildlife Loop Road, early or late. Bison anywhere along it, prairie dog towns at the eastern end, pronghorn in open grass, and the begging burros — feral descendants of a trail-ride string — usually working the cars somewhere in the middle.
Can you drive the Needles Highway in an RV? No. The tunnels are one lane and the tightest is around eight feet wide. Take a car or a truck without a trailer.
When is the Buffalo Roundup? The last weekend of September. It is free to watch, it starts early, and it draws upwards of fifteen thousand people, so arrive in the dark and expect traffic.
Next Stop
From Custer we drove north out of the Black Hills and across into North Dakota, to Medora and Theodore Roosevelt National Park — which is badlands again, different rock, and the place the Badlands bison came from.
