Spearfish Canyon

Spearfish Creek runs north off the limestone plateau of the northern Black Hills and has cut a canyon about nineteen miles long down to the town of Spearfish, with US-14A following its bends. Bridal Veil Falls spills sixty feet down a cliff beside the highway. Near the top, at Savoy, Spearfish Falls drops behind the Latchstring restaurant, and a short trail up Little Spearfish Creek reaches Roughlock Falls. The closing winter scenes of Dances with Wolves were filmed on Forest Road 222 a few miles above it.

For most of the twentieth century much of this water belonged to the Homestake. Spearfish Falls had been a tourist stop since the 1890s, when Burlington trains halted on a trestle above it, but in 1916 the mine began piping water out of Spearfish and Little Spearfish creeks to run its hydroelectric plants, and the falls went dry. The creeks were let back into their beds in late 2003, after the mine closed, and the state took over the falls from the company. Under a 2026 state law the 1917 Hydro Electric Plant No. 2, near the Devil's Bathtub trailhead, passed from the state to the Spearfish Canyon Foundation, with an eye to making it an interpretive center.

The canyon is at its best in late September and early October, when the birch and aspen turn yellow against the gray walls. The road stays open in winter, and the falls freeze.