National Park #10! It feels a bit odd writing a blog about this park as there isn’t much to say.. but hopefully my few bits of information will help prepare your expectations when visiting Wind Cave. When we visited the Black Hills we were close enough for a day trip into Wind Cave. I mentioned this in my Top 5 things to do in: Black Hills, South Dakota blog post, but we felt severely underwhelmed by Wind Cave NP. When we drove in, we were expecting to see fields of bison and other wildlife but we didn’t see much at all. There were a few prairie dogs right outside of the visitors center, but otherwise no wildlife in sight.
The park isn’t very large (it’s one of the smallest national parks actually) and once we arrived at the visitors center we realized that the main feature of the park is the actual cave. Unfortunately, the reservations for the cave tour were all booked up so we were unable to see the cave. The park ranger recommended arriving early around 7am to try and get tickets for the 9am tour. We didn’t feel like the juice was worth the squeeze to come back for the cave tour. Instead of the tour, we opted to view the interactive exhibit downstairs and made a quick visit to the gift shop for stamps and post cards.
We grabbed a park map and took a very short walk along the cave path. Once we reached the end of the trail (it dead ends into a picnic area) we decided to hop back in the RV and drive onwards through the park. About 3 minutes later we were at the exit… not kidding. This park is SMALL!
Afterwards we decided to head towards Custer State park to seek out more wildlife. We would definitely recommend prioritizing the state park over Wind Cave. I wish I had more to write about, but the takeaway would be to not drive too far out of the way to visit this one (in our opinion). It’s a beautiful stretch of land and I appreciate the conservation of land but there isn’t much to see or do unless caves are your thing!
