The Needles Highway, a fourteen-mile stretch of road, branches off U.S. 16 about five miles west of the Game Lodge. At the time of its construction in 1920-21 it was regarded as an engineering marvel, although later exploits of American highway builders, such as the road to the top of fourteen-thousand-foot Mount Evans in Colorado, have since far overshadowed this accomplishment.
The road winds and curves in an interminable pattern, finding its way, by trial and error it seems, among the great granite spires that give the region its name. These “needles,” through the last of which the highway actually plunges in a tunnel, are the remains of a great granite plateau which once covered that entire portion of the Black Hills. Contrary to popular opinion, the rocks are not outthrusts, the result of some ancient upheaval, but the last thin vestiges of this once-solid plateau. The age-old process of erosion has carved them into the shapes they now have; and the inquiring visitor can see the process still at work, for upon close inspection this granite is found to be not the impregnable stone it appears, but rock in a late stage of disintegration. Rot is the word which actually describes this formation, and in many spots whole chunks can be picked from the side of a spire by hand. It was, as a matter of fact, this situation which made the construction of the Needles Highway possible. Had the granite been solid, the task of cutting the Needles and Iron Creek tunnels would have been so expensive as to prohibit the entire undertaking.
Sylvan Lake
Not all of the scenery in the Black Hills was created by Nature. Sylvan Lake, in many respects the most beautiful corner of the region, was made entirely by hand.
It was near the turn of the century when two hunters, Dr. Jennings of Hot Springs and Joseph Spencer of Chicago, got the intriguing idea of having an additional tourist attraction in the vicinity of Harney Peak—a lake.
Along the Needles Highway
Harney Peak older by ages than the Rockies
Some lakes are difficult to construct, while some are relatively easy. Sylvan belongs in the latter category. The two imaginative gentlemen merely bought a small tract of land between two great granite shields and built a dam seventy-five feet high between the boulders. The waters of Sunday Creek, which flowed to their dam, together with local springs, at last contrived to fill the area back of the dam. Today this loveliest of lakes basks peacefully high above the world at an elevation of 6,250 feet, actually on top of a ridge, at the north terminal of the Needles Highway.