Custer State Park in South Dakota is one of America’s most visited state parks, for a reason. It’s a lovely concentration of sights and animals and cabins and campgrounds, lodges and lakes. There’s a wide variety of activities which collectively create the quintessential american park experience. At times the place is so lovely it seems a little too perfect. And of course, it is.
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Custer State Park is less of an actual “Park” in the sense of wilderness and wildlife than it is an amusement park, a highly managed and altered landscape in which very little of what is seen has anything to do with what would have been there a few hundred years ago. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a must-see destination if you’re visiting the Black Hills. But I found the elaborate illusion this park creates to be in and of itself fascinating. In this travelogue, I will have several installments on Custer State Park, but we’ll start with the wildlife. Or I should say, “wildlife.”
The burros are one of the most charming sights in the entire park. Found most frequently on Wildlife Loop Road – a paved route that completes the park’s status as a drive-through animal attraction rather than South Dakota’s Denali – the burros come in many colors, and enjoy visiting with cars that come by. While they don’t seem particularly dangerous, exercise caution with small kids. We got out of the car for a closer look.
The baby burros were numerous and predictably adorable. They are of course not native to this area – the most common story I heard was that they were descendants of a herd that was used for hauling materials up and down nearby Harney Peak. It’s quite common to encounter a burro jam on the road here.
In addition to the burros, Custer State Park is probably best known for its bison herd. The herd numbers between 1300 and 2000 animals, depending on the time of year, and is one of the most complete illusions in the park. The bison are no more “wild” than a herd of cattle – they are culled substantially each year and sold for meat.
It’s an odd arrangement. On the one hand, bison meat is far more environmentally friendly than beef. Bison coexist with prairie dogs, for example, and breed prolifically in a natural environment. They walk more gently on the land. On the other hand, it is strange that tourists come here so eager to see bison in this relatively small and highly managed setting, thinking that they are seeing something of the wild. This isn’t wild; this is a farm.
Bison herds are most commonly seen around Wildlife loop road, but the beasts show up almost anywhere in the park, depending on their mood. Heed all warnings about these creatures: though this bunch appeared to me to be less aggressive than the bison in Yellowstone, they can still change moods in an instant and are capable of tossing a grown man up in the air. While we were there one older bison got ornery around the Blue Bell Stables area and knocked down a fence. Then he walked over to a park staffer’s trailer and lay down in front of the door. The horsemen, seeing the situation, tried to scare off the hulking animal by cracking their whips, Indiana Jones-style, but the bison ignored them, only leaving a couple of hours later. When he felt like it.
The closest thing to a real wild herd animal you’ll see in Custer is in my opinion the beautiful Pronghorn antelope. Striking creatures that look like they belong in Africa, not North America, they are a native species that has had a bit of a comeback in the last half-century and now number somewhere between 500,000 to 1,000,000 nationwide.
The other major wildlife attraction in the park is the Prairie Dogs. As my best photos of Prairie Dogs actually happened at Devil’s Tower, you’ll want to see that installment of this travelogue for a closeup peek at these engaging rodents. Because the Prairie Dogs aren’t required to compete with cattle in this park, they’re safe from extermination – the fate of Prairie Dogs on many cattle ranches. You’ll see plenty of them on Wildlife Loop Road as well as Wind Cave National Park, which is just south of Custer State Park. Just pull over, turn off the engine, get out, and stand in front of a Prairie Dog town for a while. You’ll notice the individuals going through their daily lives, digging holes, minding young ones, chatting with each other, standing watch, and otherwise performing all the functions of their little community. Better than TV.