July 5 - Wind Cave NP & Custer State Park

We were up a bit after 7:00 this morning, enjoying our hotel bed. We had subpar hotel breakfast and were on our way a little after 8:00. First stop: Wind Cave National Park.

This is a national park that was created to preserve the "wind cave" that is there, and later the prairie lands above it. We had wanted to tour the cave but had missed the window to get advance tickets. Instead, would have had to wait in line to hope to get same day tickets, and we had read the lines got long. However, we learned the day before that all tours had been suspended due to the elevator breaking on July 4th!

We arrived at the Visitor's Center at 8:30 to a very quiet park - no cave tours meant very few people visited the park. We toured the exhibits which had been installed the previous year - there was an area for the above ground park and a separate area for the below the ground park. We inquired about a park video and were pleased to learn that there would be a live presentation giving a 3D virtual tour of the cave! Score! We were fortunate that the elevator broke yesterday because the presentation we saw was very good and was only given because of the broken elevator (and we might have been able to get same day tickets due to high demand on a holiday weekend). It described both the natural history and history of its discovery and development. I was really glad to have the virtual tour b/c it became apparent that there were some really tight places in the cave that could have triggered my claustrophobia. After that we took a driving tour of the park searching for wildlife. Prairie dogs were everywhere, so they were fun to see. Other than them, we saw one bison herd and a few pronghorn antelopes. Had we not seen so many of these already it would have been really cool.

Wavy leaf Thistle

Good thing we had washed our car the day before!

Upright Prairie Coneflower

We finished up here and headed back to Custer for lunch. We had great burgers at a bakery / cafe, then headed east to Custer State Park. We did the wildlife drive there that was a little better than Wind Cave, seeing bison, an elk, and a few pronghorn. The hills and mountains were pretty good as well. We got a recommendation for a hike from the park ranger and headed that way via the first of two very scenic mountain drives. 

Iron Mountain Road was amazing, with great views of the Black Hills and a number of cool views of Mount Rushmore just as you exited tunnels. Easily a top ten drive of the trip.

 This led to our hike around Sylvan Lake, and idyllic mountain lake setting with massive rocks in and around the lake completely full of people enjoying the holiday weekend. We thoroughly enjoyed our walk / hike around the lake and even watched an osprey who kept circling over us.

What we thought was going to be a no thrills walk around the lake turned into something better - we had a little slot to go through, and then a climb over some of the gorgeous rocks.

We made it to the top of the hill!

There was a family having a photo shoot in what appeared to be some national outfits - we weren't sure what country this would represent.

From there we headed on our next scenic drive, The Needles. This drive was even better than the last, with incredible views of and drives through monoliths. This was easily a top 5 drive of our trip.

I wasn't sure we were going to get by this approaching car.

We ended the evening back in Custer and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant that was good. We retired to our room early to get some relaxation before we head home in earnest tomorrow.