From Rapid City out to the Badlands Wall and back into the Hills: a launch control center under the wheat, Rushmore from the Iron Mountain Road, the Needles at dawn, a cave that breathes, and Deadwood's hillside graves before Spearfish Canyon.
4 days · 459 miles · best in summer & fall
Rapid City, SD → Spearfish, SD
The Black Hills rise out of the plains of western South Dakota like an island of pine and granite, and sixty miles east of them the plains fall away into the Badlands. This trip takes in both. It starts in Rapid City, spends the first night on the Badlands Wall, then climbs into the Hills by way of Mount Rushmore and the Iron Mountain Road, crosses the granite spires of the Needles, goes underground at Wind Cave, and ends with a run north through the Hills to Deadwood and down Spearfish Canyon. All of it is Lakota country, Pahá Sápa, land the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie set aside for the Lakota and the government took back nine years later, and the Supreme Court has since agreed it was taken unlawfully. That history is not a sidebar here; it is in the names, the carvings and the stories at almost every stop.
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Day 1
Out to the Badlands Wall
110 mi · about 2.7 hrs driving · overnight in Interior
Leave Rapid City east on I-90 for the hour's drive to Wall and Wall Drug, which has given away ice water since 1936 and still does. From Wall take SD-240, the Badlands Loop, south into Badlands National Park. The road runs along the top of the Badlands Wall past the Pinnacles and the Yellow Mounds overlooks, then drops to the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, where paleontologists work on fossils behind glass. Carry on to exit 131 and the visitor center of Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, the story of the 150 nuclear missiles that waited under these fields through the Cold War. Come back to Interior for the night and watch the light go off the Wall at dusk.
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Day 2
Into the Hills by the Iron Mountain Road
143 mi · about 3.3 hrs driving · overnight in Custer State Park
Drive back to Rapid City on I-90 and start at the Journey Museum, which tells the geology of the Hills and the Lakota story side by side. Take US-16 southwest to Hill City for the 1880 Train, a steam train that runs the ten miles to Keystone and back on the old Burlington branch line. From Keystone climb to Mount Rushmore, the four faces blasted into the peak the Lakota call the Six Grandfathers. Then leave by the Iron Mountain Road, US-16A, which the Civilian Conservation Corps finished in 1933: its pigtail bridges loop over themselves, and its tunnels frame the faces through the trees behind you. It comes down into Custer State Park at the State Game Lodge, where Calvin Coolidge spent the summer of 1927.
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Day 3
Granite and Caves
59 mi · about 1.8 hrs driving · overnight in Hot Springs
Start early, before the traffic. Go west on US-16A to Legion Lake and turn north on the Needles Highway, SD-87, which squeezes through the Needles Eye Tunnel among granite spires and comes out at Sylvan Lake. From the lake, Trail 9 climbs to the stone lookout on Black Elk Peak, the highest point in the Hills, about seven miles round trip; give it half a day. Take SD-89 south to Custer and US-385 south to Wind Cave National Park, where the Lakota emergence story begins and the cave breathes through a small hole in the rock; the tour you booked goes down among the boxwork. Finish in Hot Springs at the Mammoth Site, a sinkhole full of mammoth bones that a bulldozer opened in 1974.
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Day 4
North Through the Hills
147 mi · about 4.1 hrs driving · overnight in Spearfish
Head north on US-385 to Custer and west on US-16 to Jewel Cave, more than 200 miles of mapped passages, much of it first explored by two rock climbers, Herb and Jan Conn, from 1959. Return toward Custer and go north to Crazy Horse Memorial, carved on private land without federal money since 1948 and still not finished, a project some Lakota have opposed. Continue north on US-385 through the central Hills to Deadwood. Walk the historic district, the gold town built on treaty land and rebuilt in brick after the 1879 fire, then climb to Mount Moriah Cemetery, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried. End the trip on US-14A down Spearfish Canyon, nineteen miles of limestone walls and waterfalls, into Spearfish.
The drives this trip follows
Each one is traced end to end on its own page, with every stop worth making along the way.
