Custer State Park, SD

[trialsrider]

I spent 6 weeks out west in South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. I visited Custard State Park in SD and did as loop around Needles Highway and Iron Mountain Rd. I don't ride road much, so this was one of the best road rides I have every done. Fantastic scenery and just fun highway to ride. Most see if you are there!

My route




Lots of cool tunnels



They called these Pigs Tails. They were road circles stepping down the hill, half bridge - half side of mountain.



Sylvan Lake


Mount Rushmore




Connector Road I used



Needles Eye Tunnel

[Skinny-J]

Very cool Sean. We spent a couple days in that area when we did our big cross country family camping trip in 2022. I definitely thought to myself that I needed to come back one day. Now I know I do!

Enjoy and hope to ride with you soon!

SJ

BTW, think we were in the same parking lot for our respective pics of Rushmore...lol

[Bucho]

Cool Sean!
What bike are you riding?

Id like to do a lot more western trips, bringing a bike out to explore and ride.

[smdub]

Very cool pics. Thanks.

[trialsrider]

Cool Sean!
What bike are you riding?

Id like to do a lot more western trips, bringing a bike out to explore and ride.

Phil,

Its a Triumph Scrambler 1200xc. Small compact bike form a Ht. perspective.

[phoo]

I don't know if you didn't see it (I don't know how, unless trees are too tall now?) but those three tunnels through the mountain are designed to frame Mt Rushmore in the distance.

Here's a video of the area. I highly recommend it. Sorry for the pixels. This video is from 2005. Some day I need to make a new version of this video without the bar scene at the beginning that is probably only interesting to family, so this link skips to the riding, which starts at 2:47.



At 10:09, the shows a tunnel on Iron Mountain Rd framing Mt Rushmore in the distance.

9:07 of the same video is a corkscrew (called a "pigtail" above), where the road does a corkscrew over itself, a 540 degree turn, to gain altitude quickly.

Custer Wildlife loop starts at 5:18 and there's an exciting part with buffalo at 7:18.

Iron Mountain Road starts after the idiot almost gets run over by buffalo. Oh, there's also a corkscrew right at the start of thissegment, at 8:45.


Thanks,

~Patrick

[Twist]

Great photos and thanks for sharing them. We really enjoyed our trip through there several years ago and all agreed that the Black Hills was way better than Yellowstone on our big ride and camping.