Custer State Park, South Dakota, United States
One of the nice things about the Blacks Hills of South
Dakota is the density of attractions and activities in a relatively small area.
That makes it somewhat unusual in the West where you typically have to drive
hours between sights. Mount Rushmore, Wind and Jewel Caves, and Custer State Park
are pretty close to each other with the town of Custer smack dab in between
then and other towns like Deadwood, Spearfish, and Rapid City not far off.
Custer State Park regularly makes lists of top 10 state
parks in America. It could easily be a
national park were it not a matter of which entity owns the land, but it
contains many of the scenery, wildlife, and recreational amenities typical of
national parks. It is also adjacent to an actual national park, Wind Cave N.P.
just to its south. After a morning at
Mount Rushmore we took the Iron Mountain Highway through Black Hills National
Forest over a scenic pass into the heart of Custer, known as the Wildlife
Loop. Although I passed through the park
in 2013 with my friend Myra, I don’t think we paid the park entrance fee that
enables you to drive the park roads.
We did see some bison and other wildlife from
the through roads back then, but nothing like the concentration Rodrigo and I
saw this time around. I commented that
it’s like an American Serengeti. I believe the more moderate elevation and more
open woodland and grassland supports a higher concentration of wildlife than
Yellowstone’s denser forest and higher elevations. Among those we saw were huge colonies of
prairie dogs, numerous pronghorn, mule deer, white tail deer, and wild turkeys.
Custer also has one of the biggest wild bison herds in the country. Apparently
they roam freely much of the year, but sometime in September there’s a big
roundup in which they are moved to a fenced part of the park. It sounds like a
big and fun tourist event.
Rodrigo really likes caves, so I figured I’d take him to
Wind Cave National Park. It turns out, though, that the cave tour there is not
running because the elevator down to it broke. Tours are not expected to resume
until sometime in 2025. It is not really
clear to me why Wind Cave has full national park status while Jewel Cave is
just a national monument.
Jewel is actually the physically larger system in
terms of mileage of passages they have found.
So we just substituted a trip to Jewel instead of Wind Cave. That was OK with me since I toured Wind in
2013 but believe it was 1992 when I toured Jewel, long enough ago that it felt
like something entirely new to me.
For three nights we stayed in the Chalet Motel in Custer, a
small family-run place where we had our own little casita. By early October, the busy Black Hills summer
season was winding down and a great many businesses in Custer had already
closed for the season. That includes the Mount Rushmore Brewery, a local place with
three restaurants on premises I was hoping to try. We found decent enough meals
at the few open restaurants in town, including trying out some Strawberry-Rhubarb
Pie a La Mode and the Purple Pie Place. Rodrigo had never had rhubarb before
and didn’t even know what it was. And at the Buglin’ Bull Restaurant we got to
try Bison Chislic, something I had never heard of before but is apparently
South Dakota’s official state food.
Chislic is marinated cubes of meat that are
then grilled. It can be made with beef, lamb, mutton, or venison as well as
bison. To my surprise, it is not something of Native American origin but rather
something brought over by settlers from the Crimea (if Wikipedia is to be
believed).
On our final night we went to the Gold Pan Saloon, allegedly
the oldest saloon in the Black Hills. The steaks were good, but as we were
finishing up they announced Tuesday night Bingo. Hey, why not stay an play? Being the cheapskate I am, I only bought 7
bingo cards for the two of us and we each only played one card at a time. What
luck, though – I won both the second and third rounds, but I let Rodrigo claim
one of them. We got to pick our prizes,
a tee-shirt for Rodrigo and a Hoodie for myself.
One of Custer’s attractions are its numerous brightly-painted
statues of bison scattered along Main Street. I think there are several towns
across America that do something similar, but the only other one I’ve seen myself
are the Dala Horses of mostly Swedish Lindsborg, Kansas. Something we couldn’t help but notice about
small town Custer was how the shirt shops didn’t even bother to take in their
merchandise hanging outside in for the night. Maybe they have cameras to
lookout for thieves, but it most other places those shirts wouldn’t last the
night unguarded. Custer ain’t San Francisco!
2025-05-23