Needles Highway

Peter Norbeck, the South Dakota governor who did more than anyone to make Custer State Park, wanted a road through the granite needles, and he marked the course himself on foot and on horseback. The road was finished in 1922. It runs about fourteen miles as SD 87, from near Legion Lake in the park north past Sylvan Lake to US-16/385, climbing through ponderosa pine and spruce and between the spires.

It was made for slow cars. Near the top the Needles Eye Tunnel is cut through the rock eight feet wide and nine feet nine inches high, and a line of cars waits at it most summer afternoons; just beyond, the Needle's Eye itself is a slit worn through a tall granite blade by water and frost, and most of the people who drive through the tunnel miss it. The Cathedral Spires stand off to the west, and turnouts give room to stop. The road closes to vehicles with the first snow and reopens in spring, when it can be walked or skied in the meantime.

The Needles Highway is one leg of the seventy-mile Peter Norbeck byway, which loops on over the Iron Mountain Road, built in the 1930s with pigtail bridges that curl over themselves and tunnels aimed to frame Mount Rushmore. Norbeck's advice for it stands: drive slowly, and better yet, get out and walk.