Western National Park Trip: Part 3 (August 2025)

Day 5

This was designed as a travel day to make the 7-hour trip from Cody, Wyoming to Rapid City, South Dakota. We started the day exercising in the motel’s fitness center before beginning our long drive from Cody, Wyoming to Rapid City, South Dakota. I was able to drive 8o mph for the first time, legally.

We did have one stop built into the travel day; Devils Tower National Monument first came to my attention when I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. It was exciting seeing the Tower from several miles away. We did a 2-mile hike around the base of the tower, took lots of pictures, and stopped on the way out to see a Prairie Dog Town. We also noticed that there were a lot of motorcycles at Devils Tower. Seems that this was Bikers Week in Sturgis, SD. But everyone was well behaved including us.

Day 6

We started our day by driving 1 1/2 hours to Mount Rushmore National Monument. We started our tour by walking the Avenue of Flags. Of course, we stopped and found the South Carolina state flag. We continued on to the Grand Terrace to get our first great view of the monument that is composed of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. We then hiked the Presidential Trail which is a paved 3/4-mile path that led us through Ponderosa pines and piles of granite boulders. This path gives you some interesting views of the monument. We also stopped at the Sculptor's Studio to learn more about Gutzon Borglum, his scale model, and the process of carving Mount Rushmore. We finished our visit by stopping at Carver’s Market for a well-deserved ice cream.

Our second stop of the day was Custer State Park which is huge. Encompassing 71,000 acres in the Black Hills, Custer State Park is home to a large herd of bison (approx. 1,500). We stopped at the Bison Center where we learned about the annual fall bison roundup and auction. To manage the herd they auction off around 500 bison each fall. We then proceeded to drive the Wildlife Loop Road. We did see a small herd of bison standing in a very distant field. We did two small hikes and even saw some wild burros.

Our final stop of the day was Wind Cave National Park which was our 41st national park we have visited together. Wind Cave was the first cave system to become a national park. It was later joined by Mammoth Cave (Kentucky) and Carlsbad Caverns (New Mexico). First, we hiked the Rankin Ridge Trail which took us directly under a historic fire tower. This was a short but beautiful, 1 mile hike, which meandered through ponderosa trees and up to the highest point in the park. At the peak we were able to see Badlands National Park and Buffalo Gap in the distance. Next, we joined a tour of the cave and walked about a mile underground, and at its deepest we were 260 feet below the surface. The other cave national parks had huge open rooms with ceilings hundreds of feet high. This is not true of Wind Cave. The tour is basically a hike through what feels like one long tunnel with just a few very small more open areas. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to get good pictures inside the cave. After a very busy day we returned to spend the night in Rapid City, SD.