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