From the Badlands National Park to Mount Rushmore, from the historic small town of Interior to an abundance of unique wildlife, there is no end to the exciting adventures in South Dakota’s Badlands and Black Hills. Mount Rushmore sits about 100 miles west, making it a comfortable day trip from your Badlands base camp, while closer to home you can drive the Badlands Loop Road, spot bison and bighorn sheep, or explore the fossil beds that make this landscape one of the richest in the world.
Badlands National Park spans 244,000 acres of rugged buttes, canyons, and mixed-grass prairie in southwestern South Dakota. The park is home to one of the world’s richest fossil beds, along with wildlife including bison, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs, and the endangered black-footed ferret. The Badlands Loop Road (Highway 240) winds roughly 40 miles through the park, connecting overlooks like Big Badlands, Panorama Point, Yellow Mounds, and Pinnacles Overlook, along with the Ben Reifel Visitor Center. For a closer look at wildlife, Sage Creek Rim Road offers some of the best chances to spot bison and prairie dogs in their natural habitat.
As the oldest town in the Badlands, dating back to the 1880s, Interior, South Dakota, sits just outside Badlands National Park’s south gate. Public lands near town offer spectacular landscapes and unique wildlife.
“Must see” nearby destinations include Badlands National Park, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the Badlands Loop Scenic Byway, and Buffalo Gap National Grassland.
The Delta-09 missile silo held an active Minuteman Missile from 1963 until the early 1990s, armed with a 1.2 megaton nuclear warhead. It was one of 150 such silos scattered across western South Dakota, part of a network of 1,000 Minuteman missiles on alert nationwide from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Today, the silo houses a preserved Minuteman II missile behind a glass viewing enclosure, and visitors can tour the site daily during the open season.
The iconic Wall Drug has been a Great Plains tradition since 1931, when Ted and Dorothy Hustead began drawing weary travelers off Highway 16 with a simple offer: free ice water. Nearly a century later, this free, family attraction features an old-time five-and-dime, art gallery, animated dinosaur exhibits, gift shops, and restaurants — and still welcomes more than two million visitors a year. Still offering free water for road weary travelers.
Located in Quinn, South Dakota, the Badlands Observatory was founded in 2000 by amateur astronomer Ron Dyvig, who designed and built the facility’s 26-inch Newtonian reflector telescope by hand. Best known for contributing over a decade of asteroid-tracking data to NASA’s Near Earth Object mapping program, the observatory offers nighttime programs exploring deep-sky objects like nebulae and galaxies, with day viewing of the sun, moon, and planets also available.
Surrounded by South Dakota’s Black Hills, the iconic Mount Rushmore National Memorial tells the nation’s story through the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the 60-foot-tall faces into the granite mountainside between 1927 and 1941, choosing the four presidents to represent the nation’s birth, growth, development, and preservation. Today, Mount Rushmore draws more than two million visitors a year.
