Custer State Park!

We spent the day and night in South Dakota's first and largest state park. It was a first for us and we kept asking ourselves, "What took us so long?"

Its history dates back to 1897 and I find it incredibly interesting. Just eight years after South Dakota joined the union, Congress granted to the state, sections 16 and 36 in every township as school lands. South Dakota had difficulties attempting to administer the scattered blocks of state school lands within the Black Hills timberland. In 1906, negotiations opened to exchange the scattered lands for a solid block. In 1910, South Dakota relinquished all rights to 60,000+ acres of timberland within the Black Hills Forest Reserve in exchange for nearly 50,000 acres of forest in Custer County and about 12,000 acres in Harding County. Together, these two parcels were designated Custer State Forest in 1912. After action by the State Legislature, having been prompted by the urgings of “prairie statesman” Governor Peter Norbeck, Custer State Forest became Custer State Park. Who knew?!
Bison wander the park’s 71,000 acres, which they share with pronghorn antelope, elk, mountain goats and a band of begging burros. Our animal sightings began almost immediately. Giddiness ensued.

Our first stop was at the Blue Bell Lodge, an early 1930's CCC project.

We were there for the coffee, and ironically, the buffalo sausage! Both were delicious.
A fun pause was at Prairie Dog Town where black-tailed prairie dogs live in social “towns”. The colonies help shape the prairie by clipping vegetation and turning soil, which attracts bison, burrowing owls, hawks, badgers, and snakes. Thankfully, we only saw the darling dogs.

These guys were a treat.  The burros are descendants of pack animals brought to the Black Hills by miners in the mid-1870s.
Sylvan Lake Lodge once used the donkeys to carry tourists up to the summit of Black Elk Peak. When the tourist rides stopped in the late 1920s, the working burros were released into the park to live in the wild.
They were incredibly friendly.

Our next stop was so informative. Completed in 2022, the Bison Center brought the story of the North American bison to life and answered so many questions we had.
The free roaming herd of nearly 1,400 bison at Custer State Park is one of the world's largest publicly owned bison herds.
All of these magnificent beasts are here because of a 1914 purchase of 36 Bison from a forward thinking rancher. Wow.




This is my favorite traffic jam... ever!

We only saw one pronghorn antelope but that was special enough.
And how about this amazing building? C.C. Gideon opened the Game Lodge on August 8, 1921. Only 72 days later, it burned down but was resurrected by the following June. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge and Mrs. Coolidge spent three months at the Game Lodge calling it the “Summer White House”. How cool.
A stroll around the shore of Sylvan Lake ended our day of sightseeing.
We enjoyed a peaceful night at the aptly named Center Lake Campground, nestled in the center of Custer State Park. Poet Badger Clark described it as a place "where one can still be an unworried and unregimented individual, wear any old clothes, sit on a log, and get their sanity back again." We will return to this South Dakota treasure one day. 

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