Guys, I cannot get over how much is in South Dakota. We were here a week just between the Badlands and the Black Hills and we still feel like we barely scratched the surface. We left a lot of trails untrodden and there are still entire areas that we still need to explore. But we explored hard this week and it definitely left us wanting to see more!

What We Explored While Camping in South Dakota

Badlands National Park

Badlands National Park is a really unique national park made up of the badland formations that give the park its name along with being a place for unique wildlife like big horn sheep, bison and prairie dogs! There are massive amounts of fossils in the park, massive spires and endless mazes of uniquely colored badlands ranging in color from taupe to pink to yellow. Here’s a little of what we did!

Cliff Shelf Nature Trail – This trail is really pretty and is a good introduction to the Badlands. It takes you through a chalky white texture and you get to walk through a section that’s tree-covered, which was really beautiful too.

Fossil Exhibit Trail – This is a really quick trail that goes around a little flat section of the Badlands. It’s an easy and accessible boardwalk trail and it was interesting. There are signs with examples of what fossils of specific animals that were found in the Badlands. Charleigh loved this trail and asked to do it multiple times.

Notch Trail – This was the most adventurous trail of them all. It isn’t an especially long trail, nor would I call it strenuous, but there is a ladder that you have to ascend up the side of the Badlands to carry on to the notch that’s naturally carved out. This notch offers a viewpoint over the Cliff Shelf Trail and beyond. It’s incredibly windy up there, but absolutely beautiful. It’s an out and back trail, so good news, you get to go back down the same ladder that you went up!

Door Trail – This was the second-most adventurous trail if you ventured of the boardwalk section. There are beautiful views at the end of the boardwalk, but the highlight for me was absolutely once you got off the boardwalk. There are numbered yellow poles that help you navigate your way through the maze of badlands, and that just felt really adventurous and you got to see some really cool views from within the badlands. I love an adventure, and although this trail was short, it felt adventurous. You’ll know you’ve reached the end when you see a brown sign that literally says End of Trail.

Window Trail – This is one of the shortest trails we did, but holy cow, does it pack a punch?! It’s a simple, accessible trail that’s a little over a quarter of a mile, roundtrip. But the viewpoint at the end is truly unreal. The views were just completely awe-inspiring! I think it’s one of the best views in the entire national park.

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Custer State Park

Custer State Park was impressive from the moment we pulled in. While the landscape is the most scenic up by the Needles Highway and the lakes tucked up further in the Black Hills, we were wowed from the moment we pulled in because we just saw loads of wildlife right out of the gate: bison, prairie dogs and even some big horn sheep ewes! But then, as we went on, the beauty of the landscapes rivaled those of many national parks we’ve seen. This beautiful park should be up there with Wind Cave and Mount Rushmore.

Cathedral Spires Trail – This is one of the most popular hikes in the park and is found between the two popular tunnels. It takes you up a moderate incline with a couple spots of incline into a beautiful section of pointy, rocky peaks. It’s a really stunning trail and even though it’s a little more moderate, Charleigh did it on foot. I loved it as well.

Sylvan Lake Trail – Part of the loop was closed, so we didn’t get to do the whole thing, but even still, this was an absolutely beautiful trail. The lake up here had unbelievably blue water surrounded by these crazy peaks and formations that are seemingly made of giant rocks stacked Jenga-style all around it.

Legion Lake Loop Trail – This is a small but beautiful lake with some rock formations and beautiful trees around it. It’s a short, simple trail and Charleigh loved this trail!

Wind Cave National Park

Our trip to Wind Cave National Park was a first-time visit for all of us! The drive in was really pretty and there’s a lot more here than just the cave. The cave is a dry cave, so the formations aren’t as “grand” as other caves, but they do have 90% of the unique cave formation known as boxwork, in the entire world! Personally, I think the rest of the park was just as impressive, if not more.

Rankin Ridge Trail – Rankin Ridge takes you to the highest point in the park. It’s a loop trail or you can take a shortcut from the wider path, but highly recommend doing the full loop to go through the trees. It’s very scenic!

Natural Entrance Cave Tour – We did this tour because it was the earliest we could. I initially wanted to do the Garden of Eden. This one was a little longer and meant that we missed Liam’s nap, which also meant that he was incredibly cranky through the cave tour. So cranky that we were low-key asked to go ahead with the other ranger. We still got to see the incredible examples of box work formations, though.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Mount Rushmore is another stop that I’d made as a kid. As a little kid, I was not impressed whatsoever from my recollection and I honestly had been holding on to that memory of it all. So much so that I almost tried to dissuade Matt from making this stop, but I’m actually really glad we did this! While I would like it the most if it was just the nature here, it’s still really impressive and the nature surrounding it was incredible.

Presidents Trail + The Nature Trail – We did the two trails here at the park to get closer to Mount Rushmore and to just burn off some energy hiking. There are a ton of stairs here and we went the perfect route – starting closest to Washington – so that we mostly went down the stairs instead of going up them and the kids had a blast jumping down all of the stairs. It was so cute!

Bonus Pop Over to Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming

This is a stop I remember being obsessed with as a kid and I was very excited to revisit this with my own family. We had a blast here! This is one of the most unique spots I’ve ever visited and I always looked back on this stop incredibly fondly. We all really enjoyed this stop!

Tower Trail – This is a trail that circumnavigates the Devils Tower formation. You go through a beautiful grove of ponderosa pines, you can see climbers making their way up, and there are some really pretty overlooks as well.

Joyner Trail Overlook – This was a spot that was recommended by the park ranger in the Visitor Center. She said the trail was lovely, but that even if you just drove to the trailhead, you’d get an incredible view of Devils Tower with more prairie in front of it making it a bit of an unobstructed view.

Stopping in at Devils Tower Trading Post Afterward – There is a little shop outside of the park boundary that serves ice cream and other snacks and they have picnic tables out back with a stellar view of Devils Tower. So, of course, CJ and I had a little mother/daughter ice cream date looking out over it. It was a really sweet little moment.

Kitschy Roadside Stops

I think that South Dakota currently takes the cake for roadside kitsch. We made four stops simply for unique, albeit somewhat silly, things on our weeklong road trip. This feels like a record for us! I do love a silly roadside stop.

Mitchell Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota – The exterior and part of the interior of this building is decorated with various parts of corn cobs and husks. It’s truly impressive!

Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota – This western-style shopping complex is a true kitschy destination. It has dozens of shops, silly things to see like giant dinosaurs! It’s a sorta silly spot, but it was a fun way to spend a hot afternoon.

World’s Largest Jackalope in Wall, South Dakota – Dahl’s Chainsaw Art has the world’s largest jackalope statue in Wall. It’s just sitting along the road and you can stop and take a quick photo.

World’s Largest Bigfoot in Keystone, South Dakota – Another Dahl creation sits alongside the road en route to Mount Rushmore. It’s a seated Bigfoot that looks just like Harry from the classic, Harry and the Hendersons. My parents actually sent this to us because of my obsession with Thomas Dambo Trolls.

Collecting Junior Ranger Badges

Guys, I’m obsessed with the Junior Ranger Program that the National Park Service has at most of our national parks, monuments, etc. They’re such amazing opportunities to get your kids interested in nature from a young age and dig in deeper to the place that they’re our. They’re educations, but fun and they get to collect badges from across the country! You can read more info about and our thoughts on the Junior Ranger Program here. On this trip, Liam earned his first two Junior Ranger Badges and Charleigh got four on this trip!

South Dakota Camping Diaries

This is where we share more in-depth info about the specifics of the camping aspect of our trip.

While we were in South Dakota, we knew we wanted to only stay in one place so we didn’t have to pick up and move again and again. Honestly, on this trip, that was both a curse and a blessing. We chose a spot close to the Badlands, which is nice for its more remote nature, but if I were spending a whole week in the region between the Black Hills and Badlands, I think I would probably choose to stay closer to the Black Hills both because there’s more civilization there and all of the things we did, other than the Badlands, took us through Rapid City.

That said, the Badlands/White River KOA we stayed in was perfectly lovely, we honestly were barely there because we were exploring so much, but for the Badlands, the location cannot be beat! Unfortunately, the remoteness of this KOA ended up being an even bigger hinderance that we thought it would. Our best laid plans for keeping our budget down this trip were foiled by a refrigerator issue. Our fridge went out on the way down, so we lost literally everything in there. This meant we spent a lot more time going back and forth because town was about an hour away, but more than anything, it just meant we ate a lot more junk than we wanted to because we still tried to keep the budget low by eating mostly fast food, which makes us feel a little blah. We’ve already called our camper place and we’ll be taking the camper in basically as soon as we get to town.

On our last night, we planned to hit the road as early as possible, so we were trying to get cleaned up and hooked up so that we could just take off in the morning. Instead, our tongue-jack stopped working and we didn’t have the tool for it. So, Matt had to figure out a way to rig it to work in the very short term. Luckily, the camper is going in tomorrow anyway, and we’re adding that tool to the list to not forget on our upcoming 24-day travels.

While it wasn’t flawless, it was a beautiful trip filled with a lot of beautiful and special memories for our family of four. We checked off some firsts, visited fun places I went as a child and just spent a ton of quality time together. I love that this is how we’re spending our days.

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