South Dakota: Day 4 - Custer State Park, Needles Highway, Wildlife Loop, Iron Mountain Road & Mount Rushmore

Day 4

Wow, we slept so good and and at 7:30AM we left for for our big Mount Rushmore or “Faces” day, as Delaney calls it. We did Needles Highway to Wildlife Loop to Iron Mountain into Mount Rushmore. We purposely decided to do this route in a counter clockwise in order to end at Mount Rushmore after about 2.5 hours of driving in the early morning, so that we could find the animals in the heart of Custer State Park. Some had said the animal sightings, rival Yellowstone, so we were excited to see.

Early in the drive, we stoped at the first major tunnel on Needles Highway. It was "the" needle. We walked the tunnel, explored and then drove through the one way tunnel. I can't imagine this place in the middle of the day with traffic. We were in a Large SUV Navigator and the sides were 6 inches from the side mirrors. I seriously don't know how RV's make it through. The first one, we had to pull over and explore and it was the famous "needle." Carter wanted to video us going though the tunnel.

The far southern part of the Wilderness Loop is where we found the burros and have fed them an entire bag of carrots. I am certain, this part of the day, all the kids will remember as the most memorial part of Custer Park. 

We found the 1300 bison right near the northeast entrance. It was so much fun standing outside the sunroof and watching the the males paired off with the females. It must have been mating season because it was so clear that a male was following a female. There were SO many babies! There was one baby that caused a "bison" jam standing on the road because he was drinking the water puddled on the road from the morning's light rain. 

Iron Mountain Road with the 3 tunnels designed to frame my Rushmore was super cool. This 17 mile stretch of road had 314 curves, 14 switchbacks, 3 pigtails and 3 one lane rock tunnels. It was Sweet Delaney got a little car sick around this time from all of this but it was incredible to see how they designed all the tunnels to frame Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore was really great. Super well laid out, even with so many people there and COVID-19. The older kids has done mini reports on it, the weeks leading up to the trip, so they had an appreciation for it, which was awesome. And for some reason, “the faces” were what Delaney talked about the most the first 2 days of our trip. The rain stopped and it turned into a wonderful day and we spent nearly 3 hours enjoying it’s magnificence, walking the Presidential Trail with it’s 461 steps, listening to a Ranger talk about how the sculptor built it 14 years. 

After all the education stuff, it was time to try out the famous ice cream which is said to be the country's original vanilla ice cream recipe of Thomas Jefferson's. It really was yummy.

I walked the kids downtown to shop, before heading to Praire Berry Winery for dinner and wine tasting. It was a beautiful evening eating and playing outside.