Black Elk Peak

For a century and a half the summit carried the name of General William S. Harney, who in September 1855 led an army column against Little Thunder's Sicangu Lakota camp at Blue Water Creek in Nebraska and killed some eighty-six people, many of them women and children. Basil Brave Heart, an Oglala elder, asked for the name to be changed. The South Dakota board on place names heard him out at public meetings and voted to keep Harney, and the federal Board on Geographic Names overruled it on August 11, 2016, naming the peak for Black Elk.

At 7,242 feet it is the highest point in the state. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the stone fire lookout on its summit in the late 1930s, with stairs and a small dam cut into the granite, and rangers watched for smoke from it until 1967; it is open, and the views run across the whole of the hills. The ashes of Valentine McGillycuddy, the doctor and Indian agent at Pine Ridge who spent years in conflict with Red Cloud, are interred near the top under a plaque.

Most hikers start at Sylvan Lake in Custer State Park and climb Trail 9 through ponderosa pine and granite spires, about three and a half miles each way, returning by Trail 4 past Cathedral Spires and Little Devils Tower. The summit lies inside the Black Elk Wilderness, where no motors or bicycles are allowed.