Wind Cave National Park and Mount Rushmore National Memorial are must see places on any visit to the western part of South Dakota! If you’re an animal lover, we hope you get to see bison, coyotes, prairie dogs, pronghorn and mountain goats like we did!

South Dakota Highlights on Friday, October 27, 2017

• The animals – bison, coyotes, prairie dogs, mule deer, pronghorn, mountain goats
• Rankin Ridge trail (1 mile loop) at Wind Cave National Park
• Wind Cave natural entrance tour
• Boland Ridge trail at Wind Cave National Park
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial

We arrived to the Denver airport on Thursday night around 11 p.m. on a last minute, direct Frontier Flight for $97! For our three day trip, we found a car with Payless Car Rental for under $70. I love using CarRentals.com for great, last minute deals! Have I mentioned before that we’re carsleepers? Well, we are and we love it! We spent the night in the Walmart parking lot in Fort Collins, Colorado about an hour away and then headed to Wind Cave National Park (another 4 hours) in South Dakota very early in the morning. Through our travels, we’ve learned to be light packers and filled one of our two personal items with two blankets.

We entered the park from I-385 intending to find the visitor center, but turned onto I-87, which was not the right way. It was meant to be though because we got some great views of bison. We found a few bison almost instantly upon turning onto the road and then two more up the road at Lookout Point Trail. Here’s a map of the park if you want to follow along: https://www.nps.gov/wica/planyourvisit/upload/WICAmapBrochure.pdf

As we continued along I-87, there are two narrow bridges. After the second narrow bridge, we drove about another mile or so before we pulled off to the side. Stay alert because it turned out we had parked by a prairie town! A prairie town is literally grasslands with adorable prairie dogs and their homes.

Since it was so quiet, we could hear them chirping to each other and enjoyed watching them eat and pop in and out of their mounds. From here, we turned around, made it back to I-385 and found the visitor center. On the drive up to the visitor center, again, there are TONS of prairie dogs to see. If you have an interest in touring the “Wind Cave”, it’s a good idea to buy your ticket early (we were told they’re refundable). We bought our tickets ($5 per person) for the Natural Tour for the 1 p.m. tour and got advice on places to see from the extremely helpful ranger. Since we had a little less than 3 hours before the tour (we barely missed the 10 a.m. tour), we drove back up I-87 to Rankin Ridge. It’s a relatively easy 1 mile loop that gets you to the highest point in the park. While on our hike we saw a mule deer (keeping our streak alive with this being our 7^th national park in a row of spotting a deer) and some beautiful views of the park. Traveling on the off season has some huge advantages – we didn’t see a single other person!

On our drive back down I-87, we looked up and saw a coyote slowly crossing the field! As we followed the coyote, we spotted a second coyote! How cool is this? I took this picture from a bit of distance with my Nikon Coolpix L340*. We also found the same bison from earlier in new positions by the Lookout Point Trail and near the intersection of I-87 and I-385. While on the main road (I-385), we drove past the visitor center and found tons of bison on the side of the road. We were in picture heaven! As we approached Gobbler Pass, we spotted a coyote (our third one)! We stopped and watched the coyote walk by two bison, completely uninterested in each other. What was interesting was listening to the prairie dogs going crazy and warning each other!

We turned around because we didn’t want to exit the park and used the map to find the tiny pull off (for about 3 cars) at the Cold Brook Canyon trailhead. It was a peaceful walk, with tons of bison remnants to watch for as we stepped.

We returned to the visitor center for the 1 p.m. tour. Wind Cave recently became the 5^th longest cave in the world (up one spot from #6). The ranger who served as the guide was super passionate and started by showing us the natural entrance. It’s really small! The park measures the barometric pressure so you can see whether the wind is blowing into or out of the cave. The highlight was entering the room at the end dubbed “The Post Office” which has beautiful boxwork (the cave is famous for this). The cave was definitely worth the $5!

We found the park map to come in handy. From I-87 we turned onto NPS-5. This is an unpaved road, but easy to drive. Along the drive we saw lots of prairie dogs and some pronghorn. We got to the intersection of NPS-5 and NPS-6 where we turned and found the small lot for the Boland Ridge trail. Again, we had to watch our step for animal remnants, but we also wanted to enjoy our surroundings. We came across a band of pronghorn. They watched us like hawks and it was fun to watch them jog away considering they’re the fastest animal in North America. We also found many more bison in this area. Wind Cave National Park impressed us!

We drove almost an hour out of the park, through Custer (where there are gas stations) and onto Mount Rushmore National Memorial. As we were approaching the parking entrance, we spotted deer grazing and two mountain goats! As we looked up from the mountain goats, we realized they were perfectly in front of the presidents’ heads!

We took advantage of the photo opportunity and then continued to the parking lot. We fully expected to pay about $11 for the parking structure, but there were no attendants when we entered shortly after 5 p.m. We parked for free and began our walk up to the memorial. The walk is beautiful. As you walk the Avenue of State Flags, you can get a picture with your home state and notate the day it became a state.

There is a large viewing area as well as steps down to another viewing area to see Mount Rushmore. Since we arrived before sunset (sunset time: 5:51 p.m.), we enjoyed the memorial in the natural light and then stayed past 6 p.m. to see the illuminated memorial which was also cool. While this place may be crowded in the summer, there were minutes at a time where we had the entire place to ourselves!

We got a great tip from the gentleman in the Mount Rushmore store. After leaving the memorial, we followed the signs for the “Profile View” where you can park and get pictures of George Washington’s profile. Since the evening temperatures were set to fall into the 20s, we opted to find a last minute hotel deal. I am a huge fan of Booking.com*. We found a highly rated lodge called Calamity Peak Lodge for under $60 in Custer. If you’ve never used Booking.com* before, I would encourage you to use my link* so we can each get $20 when you book. The lodge was really unique inside with wooden walls, clean and had all of the normal amenities. The owner was extremely nice and met us as soon as we called to check us in. I would definitely recommend this place.

As we have in previous trips, we decided to call it a night at a reasonable time so we could wake up with the birds and go searching for animals by sunrise! Check back with us to read about the animals we found in Custer State Park and the Badlands National Park on Saturday!