Custer County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Custer County

Seventy-one thousand acres of Custer State Park hold the second-largest publicly-owned bison herd in North America — 1,300+ animals roaming a fenced perimeter that South Dakota Game Fish & Parks manages through an annual Buffalo Roundup the last Friday of September, drawing roughly 14,000 spectators to the Wildlife Loop Road for the cowboy-driven herd-management ceremony where surplus animals are cut from the herd and sold at the November livestock auction to fund herd-health veterinary work. The roundup is the largest organized bison-handling event in the world. Custer County wraps the southern Black Hills (called Pahá Sápa in Lakota; the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty recognized the Hills as Lakota land but the 1877 Black Hills Act unilaterally took them — the 1980 Supreme Court ruling in United States v.

Sioux Nation of Indians acknowledged the taking but the awarded compensation remains undrawn in escrow per Lakota refusal). Wind Cave National Park inside the county protects the world's seventh-longest mapped cave system at 161+ miles per latest NPS Foundation Document survey, distinguished by box-work calcite formations found in higher density here than anywhere else on Earth. Crazy Horse Memorial (sculpture in progress since 3 June 1948, privately funded, no federal or state money accepted per founder Korczak Ziolkowski's covenant) sits at the county line. Custer State Park's Sylvan Lake and Stockade Lake campgrounds accept rigs to 50 ft with electric hookups and are the most-booked South Dakota state-park RV-friendly bases per SDGFP visitation data. Needles Highway (SD-87) restricts vehicles wider than 8'4" or taller than 12'4" through the Needles Eye Tunnel — a hard cap for any rig over 30 ft.