Wind Cave National Park

This footprint covers part II of our easy-day of sightseeing.

There are a couple of national parks in this part of South Dakota. Of course, I checked them all out when I was researching places to see and things to do in the Black Hills.

The closest one to Custer State Park is Wind Cave National Park. In fact, it butts up to the south end of Custer. If not for the small roadside sign, you wouldn’t know that you’ve left one park and entered another. The scenery is quite similar ... so is the wildlife that calls Wind Cave NP their home.

But there is another attraction here. As you might have guessed from the park’s name, it’s a cave. Visitors can go on ranger-led tours to see boxwork, frostwork, and cave popcorn. Alas, that wasn’t an option for us. Apparently tours have been suspended since sometime in 2019 ... due to elevator repair work. Probably now impacted by the pandemic as well.

Since we could not tour the cave, and everything else was similar to Custer SP, I had scratched Wind Cave off my sightseeing list. So, why did we visit today? Because SD-87 is one of the routes to get south to Hot Springs, and it runs through the national park.

The bonus for going through the park? Another big herd of bison ... more active ... perhaps moving from one place to another, though the animals were stopping to graze and take dust baths along the way. We also saw our first real bison youngster still wearing it’s cinnamon-colored coat ... less than 10-15 weeks old. As well, we saw some small critters — black-tailed prairie dogs ... and a distant glimpse of a black-footed ferret.Read more