Too warm today to hike Black Elk Peak, so we spent the day in and around Custer State Park. We drove about 130 miles over almost 9 hours, but ended up right back where we started.🤪.                                        

We drove Needles Highway, which is just over 14 miles, but took us almost an hour with stops. If you’ve not driven it, it’s the most windy/twisty road we know of. It includes several one vehicle tunnels and lots of hairpin turns. The traffic was pretty light so we were able to stop on most of the turn-outs to enjoy the views. We were lucky it was a nice sunny day with a good breeze, so when we stopped there were no bugs, and plenty of places to take pictures.

We then drove to the main visitor center to enjoy a movie about the park and talked to some of the rangers. Then it was north along the Iron Mountain Road, very similar to Needles except it has several tunnels that look directly at Mount Rushmore as you pass through them. An amazing feat of engineering through an extremely difficult terrain. Again, the views and vistas were breathtaking. The Iron Mountain Road ends in Keystone, so we drove the Old Hill City Road back to Hill City. It follows the path of the 1880 Train, so we got to see some of the same sights, but with time to stop and take pictures.

We then drove back to Keystone by going past Mount Rushmore (we decided we’ve seen it enough times and it was awfully hot again). From Keystone it was south back to Custer State Park and the Wildlife Loop Road to see if we could see any more animals (it was after 5, and the traffic was almost nonexistent). We saw numerous Pronghorn again (including a few right next to the road), plenty of Prairie Dogs and an abundance of Bison. We also spotted quite a few White-tailed deer, many quite near the road (the grass is always greener…).

It was a great day of driving, even if we didn’t get anywhere.

Brian avoided getting car sick (thank you Bonine) and the truck did a great job handling the sharp curves and lots of downhill braking.

I’ll post a screen shot of the route we drove in the pictures.

Hopefully we’ll be climbing Black Elk Peak tomorrow morning...