Chapter 8, Custer State Park, South Dakota 2026

 After leaving the Sturgis area, we drove to Hermosa, South Dakota where we set up at the Heartland RV park.  We would use this as our base of operations while we visited the many attractions south of Rapid City.

It's a beautiful 30 minute drive from our RV park to the entrance to Custer State Park.

Custer State Park is set up into a loop drive so that you enter at one end and exit somewhere else and so you are constantly seeing new sites.  The scenery is just spectacular, and quite varied, even if you don't see any wildlife.

 Shortly, after entering the park, we began to see Buffalo (Bison for you purists) and other wildlife.   In previous visits, this is about as close as we ever got to the Buffalo and they would usually be in one section of the park.

On this visit, just about around every corner, there was another herd of buffalo. They were everywhere and included large numbers of adults and many new babies.

It looks like we are pretty close to this buffalo and that's because we were and we didn't like it. There was really no other way to continue down the road without going past the buffalo. 

The reason we didn't like it is because on prior visits to this park, we've had an opportunity to talk to some of the Rangers that work at the park. They were driving pickup trucks.  

The reason for our conversation with the Rangers was that we noticed that there weren't any un-dented panels on their trucks and we wondered how they could have run into something or bent all of the sheet metal on their trucks.  During the course of their duties, every once in a while, one of the buffalo would ram their trucks, and that's what caused all of the dents.  

For that reason, we were very nervous about driving close to the buffalo, but it turns out, there was no way to avoid it. The good news is, we did not have any close encounters of the worst kind.

We saw lots of other wildlife along the way, including these antelope.

We stopped at Stockade lake and had a picnic lunch.  It was cool and breezy. There were lots of people fishing along the bank.

There was even wildlife here to watch while we ate.  Geese and their babies were all over the banks of the lake.

There were also several prairie dog towns along the road.  The prairie dogs were scurrying everywhere and were fun to watch.  They would scurry into their burrows and then pop back up again and look around.  They really blend into the surrounding terrain, and often, you can't tell whether you're looking at a rock or a prairie dog in the distance.

As we came around one corner, we found a herd of donkeys that were working the cars that were driving by.  They would walk down the middle of the pavement, right toward the front of your car.  It was obvious that they knew that this would force you to stop, and then they could come closer looking for a handout.

As soon as one of them would take his best shot at a handout, he would move on, and another one would block the road and try again.

It was a very interesting drive through the park and we were amazed at how many buffalo herds we saw.

When they would decide to walk on the road, there wasn't anything we could do but follow along.  They did not seem to be afraid of the car, and we were just hoping that they wouldn't attack.

There were other interesting things to see in the park besides the wildlife.  In the next video, you will see numerous blown down trees. These are not little twigs, but great big fat trees that were snapped in half by high winds.  They were in clumps all around the park, but there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why some trees got blown over and others did not.

Right at the edge of the park, we came across Gordon Stockade, which is a refurbished settlement. As harsh as the climate is here, at least, in the wintertime, this must've been a really tough way to live.

It would have been a lot of work to make these roof pieces. They are interlocked like Spanish tiles.

The stockade was located right next to French Creek so at least they had a water supply.  French Creek is where the first Gold in the Black Hills was located and was the beginning of the gold rush here.

After leaving Custer State Park, we went to the small town of Custer.  The first thing you see coming into town is a giant wooden buffalo at the Bearded Buffalo Resort.

Then came the typical downtown area with lots of touristy junk stores.

When we left Custer, we headed home and drove past the Crazy Horse Monument that is being carved out of the side of a mountain.  It is huge.

This project was started in 1948 and the original sculptor has since died.  5 of his 10 children still work on the project but there is no estimated completion date.  They have a long way to go!

It was so late in the day that we did not have time to visit there, but I have since gone online and found better pictures of the sculpture.

This is what the finished sculpture is supposed to look like.

It takes real vision to be able to figure something like this out.

The sculpture’s final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. The head of Crazy Horse will be 87 feet high. If completed as planned, Crazy Horse will tower over Mount Rushmore (the heads of the four U.S. Presidents at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet high).

Click HERE for a link to details about the Crazy Horse Monument

Custer State Park is an amazing place to visit and we hope that you have an opportunity to come here sometime and enjoy the wildlife and other amazing sites.

Tom & Suzie

Chapter 7, Ellsworth Air Force Base Museum, 2026

Our next stop along our trip was the Air Museum just outside the gate at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, South Dakota.  For those of you that might travel there in the future in a BIG RV, you might want to call ahead like we did to see if there is room to maneuver and park in their parking lot.  

We are in a 45' motorhome towing a Honda CR-V and we are pretty long and wide. The nice lady we talked to before we arrived suggested we come straight into the parking lot and head straight toward the building.  Then, right in front of the building is a roundabout that let us reverse direction and then park next to the B-29.

When we got to the museum, what we found out is that the roadway outside the museum gates is narrow and so is the entrance gate and we had to wait for oncoming traffic to pass before we were able to swing wide and enter the narrow gate straight on. 

We followed the path of the yellow line I placed on the following picture and parked at the red circle and it worked out great.  

The museum had lots of interesting displays and we learned about something we had never heard of.  They took a big balloon and suspended a ball under it and let it go This model shows what it must have looked like.

Imagine what it would be like trying to get out as it is falling from 66,000 feet.

One of the interesting displays they had was an actual B1 bomber cockpit that was used as a simulator. It would allow entire flight crews to simulate a mission from engine start through an attack mission, and finally an approach and landing.

They must've had to spend hours in the simulator in order to complete an entire mission.  This is the pilot and copilot crew position.

The simulator must be a very cost-effective way to train crews for the B1 bomber, because they are immense and must cost a fortune to fly and maintain.

They also had a mock up of what the control room of an underground missile silo would look like. The two operators seats were separated by quite a distance, and the principle was that the only way to fire a missile was to turn two keys at the same time, and the keys were too far apart for one person to do it. 

 

It kept one crazy person from firing the whole works, but I'm not sure how they could make sure they didn't have two crazy people down there at the same time. Apparently their system worked because I don't think we've had any unauthorized launches.

 

There were a total of 150 underground missile complexes located in South Dakota and another 150 located in North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. They have deactivated all of the South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming sites, but the North Dakota sites are still active.

I would have loved to be at Mount Rushmore on the day that this happened!

They had lots of beautiful static displays outside, and even though we had seen many of these types before, it is always amazing to see it again, and remember all of the people that built, maintained and flew these things.

 

This is a B-29 bomber, similar to the Enola Gay which is the bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan.  It is huge.

 

It makes our huge motorhome look small.

 

We let the pictures do most of the talking on this episode.  It was a very nicely done museum and now we are heading out to Hermosa, South Dakota to continue our explorations. 

 

We will keep you posted on our adventures and we hope you get a chance to get out and do some exploring too.

 

Tom & Suzie