SOUTH DAKOTA
Custer State Park & Bear Country USA
The internet suggested Custer State Park quite a lot, and I believe rightly so. The park is really big and it seems like there’s a lot to do there.
The highest point in South Dakota is higher than you might imagine. Black Elk Peak tops out at 7,242 feet and the trail has an elevation gain of 1500 feet! For my California lungs, it was a bit of a trial.
The peak is pretty awesome. There’s a fire tower up there to hide from the wind in, and panoramic views of the surrounding black hills. You can kinda tell why they call them black hills from up here.
On our way back down we elected to go on the Cathedral Spires and Little Devil’s Tower route. We were pretty tired from hiking but my boyfriend and I had just seen Cathedral Rock in Oregon and wanted to get a Cathedral themed hiking destination again!
Thankfully you walk right past them on the main trail. You can do a short offshoot to get even closer but we didn’t think it’d be worth it, and we still had a few miles left to get back to the car.
They’re pretty majestic from afar though.
And for Little Devil’s Tower we skipped it entirely.
So clocking in a 6.4 mile hike was pretty brutal for us so the perfect next stop was Bear Country USA. This is a classic tourist trap where you drive through a small zoo essentially, and look at animals from your car. They’ve got everything in South Dakota you could want to look at, including wolves, mountain lions, bears, bison and elk.
I did google about the humane-ness of this spot and while they have taken some heat in the past, thankfully all the articles I saw were pretty old.
For dinner we grilled at our Airbnb and played Letter Jam to unwind.