Custer State Park: The Pigtail Bridges, the Begging Burros, and the Buffalo Who Are Not Impressed

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Custer State Park is famous for two things: the Cathedral Spires along the Needles Highway, and the animal drive. We already covered Needles Highway back when we promised we'd circle back to the animal drive eventually — turns out "eventually" was this trip. After leaving Mount Rushmore, we took Iron Mountain Road down toward the animal drive. We came prepared for neither the amount of time this would take, nor the carrots the donkeys were expecting.

Iron Mountain Road

Iron Mountain Road is Needles Highway's quieter sibling — less about jaw-dropping spires, more about getting you from Mount Rushmore back to Custer State Park without adding hours to your trip. Unlike the Needles Highway, it's open year-round, and the road itself has a pedigree: Senator Peter Norbeck scouted the route on horseback in the early 1930s, personally staking out a path that engineers told him was impossible. He got the last laugh — construction ran from 1932 to 1936, and Norbeck was famously unbothered by the timeline or the doubters, reportedly saying the road wasn't meant to be a super highway, and that doing the scenery justice was the whole point.

The road is famous for its pigtail bridges, which let travelers gain or lose elevation fast without carving up the mountainside. These are essentially a loop with a bridge that crosses under itself — a corkscrew of hand-fitted local timber that engineer C.C. Gideon designed specifically because Norbeck refused to let him use steel and concrete. Nearly a century later, the bridges are still standing, which is either a triumph of 1930s craftsmanship or proof that spite is a legitimate building material.

Tunnels

  • Doane Robinson Tunnel: w: 12', h: 11' 4"
  • C.C. Gideon Tunnel: w: 11' 6", h: 10' 9"
  • Scovel Johnson Tunnel: w: 10' 9", h: 11'

Norbeck and Gideon lined all three tunnels up to frame Mount Rushmore in the distance — though depending on which direction you're driving, sometimes that means checking your rearview mirror instead of your windshield. It's the only place we've been where the infrastructure has better composition than our vacation photos.

Wildlife Loop Road

The Wildlife Loop Road is a wonderful 18-mile drive where you'll see bison, prairie dogs, and donkeys. If you're lucky, you may spot some of the more elusive residents — white-tailed deer, bighorn sheep, mule deer, elk, burrowing owls, coyotes, and even mountain lions. Enjoy the animals and take your time, since regular buffalo traffic jams are part of the experience. Custer's bison herd runs somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 animals, making it one of the largest publicly owned bison herds in the world — and a bull can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and hit 35 miles per hour, which is a genuinely inconvenient combination if it decides it doesn't like you. They look friendly. They are not. Do not go within 50 yards of any wild animal, and do not, under any circumstances, try to pet them. Check out this article for more safety information: Mammals of the Badlands: Locals Who Run This.

Along the way you'll have the chance to stop at the Wildlife Station Visitor Center, where you can safely get out of your car and view the wildlife from the other side of the fence. The buffalo will come right up to it, but do not provoke or touch them. Although my wife always says "if not friend, why friend shaped," she booped one on the nose through the fence and it charged. Lessons learned.

After the visitors center, you'll meet the donkeys — Custer's famous "begging burros." Turns out they're not native wildlife at all; they're the feral descendants of a pack-animal herd that once carried tourists up to the summit of Harney Peak (now Black Elk Peak) back in the 1920s. When the trail rides shut down, the park just... let them go, and roughly 50 of their descendants have been shamelessly panhandling passing cars ever since. This is where many people bring carrots to feed them. Yes, it's okay — apparently we're just continuing eighty years of tradition.

Places to Stop

State Game Lodge

The State Game Lodge has the Peter Norbeck Outdoor Education Center, a general store, a place to stay, and a place to eat — a great stop between Iron Mountain Road and the Wildlife Loop. It's also got a genuinely wild backstory: built in 1920–21, it burned down 72 days after opening and had to be rebuilt from scratch. It clearly recovered fine, because in 1927 it became President Calvin Coolidge's "Summer White House" for three full months, and Eisenhower stopped by in 1953. Somewhere in the Black Hills, a President was fishing off a dock while we were just trying to find parking.

Blue Bell Lodge

This lodge leans more prairie than mountains, but it has all the essentials — food, restrooms, and a place to sleep. It's a great stop if you're headed west or back to Wind Cave National Park. Bonus dad-fact: it was built in the early 1920s by an executive at Bell Telephone, and it's named after the company's logo — a blue bell. Not the flower. The phone company. We were today years old when we found that out.

References

Location: Custer State Park, South Dakota, USA

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