Custer State Park

Custer State Park

It was rise and shine the next morning because we had a date with The Buffalo Safari Jeep Rides. This tour takes you along the wildlife loop road in Custer State Park. You can drive this yourself and in fact later in the week we did just that but I wanted a chance to enjoy the sight-seeing without having to drive. It was reasonably priced, I think about $40.00 per person . It turned out to be money and time well spent.

Custer State Park is named for George A. Custer, who led an expedition into the Black Hills in 1874. Although the expedition is best known for the discovery of the famous Black Hills Gold, Custer himself was more interested in the natural beauty of the area.

Custer State Park covers 71,000 acres and is home to free roaming bison, elk herds, prong horn antelope, mountain goats, big horn sheep, deer (both mule deer and whitetail) and prairie dogs along with the predators like coyotes, mountain lions and bobcats.


Deer in the park



The Wildlife Loop road is an 18 mile loop that runs from the State Game Lodge to Blue Bell Lodge passing through grassland and rolling hills and lots of wildlife.

Also near the park is Iron Mountain Road. Iron Mountain Road is part of the Peter Norbeck National Scenic Byway and leads from Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore. (Highway 16A on the maps). This can be a challenging drive with lots of twists and turns and switchbacks and three granite tunnels only 1 lane wide but it is absolutely gorgeous! Not to be missed (in spite of what my sister will tell you.)

The other major scenic highway everyone talks about is the Needles Highway. Due to time constraints, rainy weather and the fact that I had already scared Sandy once, we did not get to try this road on this trip. Maybe next time.

Everything we read referred to Custer State park as one of the truly wild places left in the country and used words like World-Class park and “close encounters of the wild kind”.

You will also come across the term “Tatanka”. This is the Lakota work for bison or Buffalo and is also the name of the official publication of Custer State park.



Buffalo


Armed with this information and a map we stopped at the reception desk in the lobby to find out about our free breakfast. I told you there’d be more on that.

There was a coffee and juice station set up where you could help yourself, a microwave and a basket of muffins from the Perkins restaurant next door. The free breakfast was a Jimmy Dean Sausage Biscuit.. When you went to the reception desk the clerk handed you your Jimmy Dean sandwich and directed you to the microwave. It was breakfast but I wouldn’t call it “world-class”. The Perkins muffins were good as was the juice but I soon learned that unless you got there early the muffins would be gone. Still for people on a budget, the price was right so thus fortified we headed off to find the Jeep tour at Custer State Park.



Rolling Hills of Custer Park


Tomorrow we meet our guide