Custer State Park
Custer State Park is located almost in the center of the Black Hills. Containing nearly one hundred and fifty thousand acres, it is one of the largest state parks in America. It was originally set aside as a state game refuge, and it was not until the advent of summer touring as a national pastime that the state of South Dakota purchased additional private lands which contained scenic wonders, incorporating all of them into the one large area.
Today the park is the center of all tourist activity in the region. A number of excellent lodges, camp grounds, and tourist courts along every road make it particularly easy for the tourist to stop at will for a day or more to enjoy the various recreational facilities as his fancy dictates. In every respect the park is effectively administered: food and lodging prices are held to a reasonable figure, the cleanliness of the buildings and grounds is regularly inspected, and the landscape is protected from commercial exploitation.
The center of the park’s activities is the Game Lodge, a monstrous Victorian hotel built in 1919 and operated under a private lease. Close by the Game Lodge are cabins, stores, eating establishments, the park zoo, a museum, and the offices of the state park officials. The Lodge, those with a flair for nostalgia will recall, achieved international renown in 1927 when President Coolidge made it the summer White House. It lies on US. 16, thirty-two miles from Rapid City and seventeen miles from the town of Custer.
It behooves the writer to mention at this point that the museum connected with the Game Lodge is by no means the drab and dusty sort of collection of impedimenta associated with the vicinity that is so often found in museums at scenic sites. Indeed, this fine attraction is an assemblage of geological, paleontological, and historical items which trace with rare discernment the whole history of the Hills through the ages, and up to our own day. The visitor who fails to pass an hour in this exciting spot will have missed the heart of the Hills entirely.
Harney Peak
Harney Peak stands like a sentinel in Custer Park. The highest point in the Black Hills, it rises to an altitude of 7,242 feet, 4,000 feet above the prairie floor outside the Hills. Higher by 900 feet than Mount Washington in New Hampshire, it is the highest mountain east of the Rockies.
High as it is, Harney Peak is by no means the typical mountain which tourists come to expect after a trip through Colorado, for example, or western Wyoming. It is older by ages than the precipitous and craggy Rockies, and the winds and waters have worked their slow erosion on it, cutting away what high shelves and escarpments might originally have existed and leaving it, except at the top, a gentle and easy mountain that may be climbed over a trail which will scarcely tax the laziest tourist.
On the top of the peak will be found the core of granite that originally broke through the Archean shales. This granite, subject to the mechanical ravages of wind, rain, and frost, is rugged and coarse, a steep dome covered with a thick lichen. From this eminence the entire Black Hills area can be seen, rolling away in every direction—great waves of pinnacle and mountain, gradually subsiding and disappearing in the haze of distance which covers the prairies. Especially striking from this spot is the view of Cathedral Park, with its hundreds of needle-like spires and organ pipes, and, sheltered in a quiet recess, that amazing phenomenon, Sylvan Lake.