Hill City, South Dakota.

There are three scenic drives through the Black Hills in and around Custer State Park. In 2017, we traveled the Iron Mountain Road. You can read about that journey here. Almost every trip, we take the Wildlife Loop Road, though I’ve never done a specific post about that highway, it is one of the major drives through Custer State Park. This post, however, features the shortest, and probably the most beautiful, scenic drive in the park. The Needles Highway is 14 miles (22.5 km) long and takes but an hour or so to drive. Allow yourself extra time if you like to stop and take photos or just enjoy the view. Remember, the person driving doesn’t get to see as much as the passengers. On days when the park is crowded, you will also need extra time to enjoy the scenery.

You can pick up the drive out of Hill City. Head southerly out of Hill City on US 385. About 3 miles (5 km) south, you will find SD-87, the start of the Needles Highway, and 14 miles (22.5 km) of beautiful scenery. From rolling plains to spectacular views of The Needles, the upward-pointing spires are aptly named.

You can also travel on the Needles Highway from the eastern end. That connection is via US 16A. At some point on the journey, you will come upon an entrance station to Custer State Park. You will be required to pay the entrance fee to travel on the Needles Highway within the park.

You may note the tight spaces on the highway. As a result, large RVs or vehicles pulling large trailers are not recommended (or even unable) to travel the highway. Needles Eye Tunnel is only 8 ft 9 in (2.7 m) wide by 9 ft 8 in (3 m) high. The sharp switchback turns are difficult for large RVs or vehicles with trailers to navigate.

SD 87 is also closed from the first snowfall until the last, basically late October through early April. At the beginning and end of the season though, it’s best to call to find out if the highway is open. You can find out more about the scenic drives in Custer State Park here.

As you climb, you will move out of the forest areas into areas that have fewer trees and more granite. The highway was completed in 1922 and consists of sharp turns, beautiful scenery, and lots of granite views. It is actually part of the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway that winds throughout the park. South Dakota Governor Norbeck planned the byway on foot and horseback and oversaw its completion. He was governor from 1917 to 1921. The Needles section was completed shortly after he left office.

The narrow, winding road can be crowded on certain days. There is often a bottleneck at either side of the one-way-at-a-time tunnels. We were lucky when we approached this tunnel that it wasn’t busy, but at the next tunnel we approached, there were many cars parked in a limited parking area where people stopped to enjoy the views. Even our Chevy Suburban was almost too big to navigate around the traffic and parked cars.

At one stop for photos, we happened to notice a climber working on climbing a granite spire. A small crowd gathered to watch his progress. Fortunately, my 300mm lens brought the climber close enough for me to share these images.

It took only about 5 minutes for this climber to ascend from the moment of my first photo to this last photo in the sequence. My Flickr gallery includes a few photos documenting his progress as he climbed the last two sections of granite.

I’ve shared 20 photos of the Needles Highway on my Flickr site. You can click on any of the images above to check out the details in 2K HD, or to see all of the images in gallery style, check out my Needles Highway Flickr album here.

John Steiner

Black Hills, South Dakota.

Probably the most famous mountain in South Dakota is Mount Rushmore, home of the four Presidents. Not far from this mountain is another mountain, a single monument to a Native American, Crazy Horse. But the Black Hills are much more than faces on mountains. We began our journey that day at Mount Rushmore, seen here captured next to an unusual cloud formation.

Lynn and I made our first visit to the monument under construction only a few miles from Mount Rushmore and featured a Travel Tuesday about the new monument here. I will let you choose to read or review that post (or not) at your discretion.

At the entrance to the Crazy Horse Monument is one of the most dynamic sculptures I’ve ever seen. The Fighting Stallions is a larger-than-life work that was sculpted by the same man who was responsible for beginning construction on the Crazy Horse Memorial. Korczak Ziolkowski also assisted Gutzon Borglum in sculpting Mount Rushmore.

When we left the Crazy Horse Monument, we continued our tour of the area by visiting Custer State Park. The image above features Stockade Lake as captured by my drone. If you click on the image, you can see that it’s a “selfie” of sorts. That’s me in the blue shirt operating the drone.

The park invites many young fisherman to try his or her luck at capturing a delicious meal, but as always, be sure your family is in compliance with state laws and park regulations on harvesting fish from the lakes in the park.

There were plenty of opportunities to capture wildlife images in the park. This ram was sitting in the shade of a small grove of trees where we found several bighorn sheep on that day. I was thankful to have my 16-300 mm zoom lens available as these beautiful animals were quite some distance up the hill from where we were standing at a pull-off.

Custer State Park, comprised of an area of 114 square miles (295 square km), is one of the largest parks in the contiguous United States. Designated as a wildlife preserve in 1919, the park is also home to a large buffalo herd. As it turned out, we didn’t happen to see many buffalo that day. In the image below, a lone bull was calmly enjoying the beautiful autumn weather.

Lynn and I have visited the park in previous years, at that time seeing only the buffalo the park is known for. This year, we not only saw the bighorn sheep but for the first time when not in a zoo, we saw pronghorn antelope. More images featuring South Dakota pronghorns like those pictured below are in my Flickr Gallery.

The autumn day gave me opportunities for some fall color photos. Aside from the uniqueness of the wildlife photos that I captured that day, my favorite capture was of this farm equipment that has seen better days and is clearly on display for passers-by on the highway out of the park.

There were plenty of autumn colors to view as we headed east, our next stop would be the Badlands National Park. We were almost home from our 8,000-mile journey, but I haven’t shared everything from this fall trip in 2020. We still have posts from the trip scheduled through the beginning of 2022.

Please click on any of the images above to visit my Flickr Album for this post. There are additional images there from this visit to Custer State Park and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Click on any of the images there for an even closer look in 2K HD.

This post is being written in mid-July, 2021, so I can announce it now that we are again in the process of planning another September/October trip. If all goes as planned, when you see this post in October, we’ll be well on our travels westward again to visit places we bypassed from last year. We are hopeful that some of the places we skipped last year due to wildfires will be open for us to see this fall. As this is being written, the west is again on fire in many locations. Between the heat and the drought, I know when September gets here, we will have to be flexible.

John Steiner

Custer State Park, South Dakota.

The largest of the four lakes in Custer State Park is Stockade Lake. The park is about a 40-minute drive from Mount Rushmore in the South Dakota Black Hills.  This artificial lake was created by the Stockade Lake Dam, construction completed on April 1, 1934. The dam created a haven for camping, fishing, hiking, and other outdoor recreation.

Named for the Gordon Stockade, a hastily built fort during the 1874 Black Hills gold rush, the lake is on French Creek. In a future post, I’ll feature a few more images of the lake and creek.

About the photo: On the southwest end of the lake, the road crosses a wooden bridge over French Creek. There is a small parking area with views of the lake, dam, and bridge. I launched the Mavic Air drone and captured some images. This image is a panorama of two images that allowed me to show more of the lake. The stitching of images and basic tweaking were done in Adobe Lightroom, with final touches completed in Luminar 4.

The two images are in RAW (DNG) format, and after processing the final image was converted to JPG for sharing here. I have mentioned before that I could let the drone create a panoramic image automatically. I don’t do that because that image is a JPG file, and I would have less control over final editing. As always, a better view of the image can be had by selecting it (if your browser supports that function.)

John Steiner