South Dakota
Looking for places to visit in South Dakota? Wondering what to do in South Dakota? We share our favorites as we travel the country.
Start with one of these.
Faces of Presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, each 60 feet tall, carved in Harney Peak Granite, and paying tribute to the leaders who shaped our country.
The Crazy Horse carving is 641 ft long and 563 ft high and has been in progress for about 74 years! It’s taking a lot longer to build than nearby Mt Rushmore because the scale is larger and it’s all done by private funding.
South Dakota was our 20th state! We stayed one night at the Elk Mountain Campground in the park near the visitor center. The first thing I did was pull out our mat and take a nap since the weather was perfect and all you could hear was the wind blowing in the surrounding grasslands.
It’s called the Badlands because that’s what the Lakota and early French trappers both called it due to how difficult the terrain is to travel through. Not too far from the park was the Minuteman Delta-09 missile silo. It is crazy to think that just in this one area of South Dakota there are over a thousand silos just like it.