South Dakota: Black Hills rich in history, mystery

"It is said that as a somewhat deflated George Armstrong Custer lay bleeding in the Montana dirt at Little Big Horn, he turned his glazed and dimming eyes east and said, 'At least we don't have to go back through South Dakota.' "

At least that's how writer Tim Cahill put it. South Dakota, it seems, is every jokester's favorite state: not so much a travel destination as a national punch line.

Call it "Nebraska without the glitz" if you will - or "The Plainest of the Plain States" or "Gateway to North Dakota" - but the joke is on those who take the comedians seriously.

I can't vouch for the rest of the state, but South Dakota's southwest corner - home to the Black Hills and nearby Badlands - is nothing like the sensory-deprivation zone the wags make it out to be. Within a few miles are, among other things, plump, rolling hills dotted with bison and prairie dogs; a chance to see wooly mammoth skeletons emerging from the ground; and a roadside attraction that would put a smile on the face of Dr. Strangelove.

Badlands National Park

Miles of dull and featureless plains suddenly wrench open into one of the most striking landscapes you'll ever set eyes on. Almost every visitor I talked to agreed: The Badlands ought to rank in the first tier of national parks.

Maybe it doesn't because it's gotten a lot of bad press over the years. Custer called it "hell with the fires burnt out." Douglas Reed wrote: "It is if it were the devil's own bit of the planet and he had stabbed and slashed with some great knife until all fertility drained away from yawning wounds." John Steinbeck said it was "like the work of an evil child ... a sense comes from it that it does not like or welcome humans."

Independently of each other, the Lakota Indians and early French fur trappers gave it the same name: the Bad Lands.

That said, Badlands National Park is one of the more user-friendly ones you'll come across. Hardy and masochistic hikers scramble through the valley bottoms, but visitors with limited mobility can see just about everything from turnouts along the 25-mile Badlands Loop Road, which winds in and out of the otherworldly buttes, mesas and pinnacles, sometimes skirting the rim, sometimes dipping to the valley floors.

If you have the time, your best strategy is to spend the night there - the campground at Cedar Pass is quite nice - and drive the loop twice, to see the landscape change appearance in the morning and evening light.

Custer State Park

Don't make the mistake, as many apparently do, of assuming this is the site of Little Big Horn, Custer's last stand. That's in Montana. This is where Custer's troops discovered gold in 1874, setting off a gold rush on land that was, inconveniently, owned by the Sioux tribe.

The big lure today is the 18-mile wildlife loop, an American-style safari on which you're almost guaranteed to see many of the park's 1,500 bison (or buffalo, if that's what you prefer to call them; weary park rangers have all but given up trying to correct people), and scores of prairie dogs and pronghorns (rangers are still fighting a probably futile battle to get people to stop calling them "pronghorn antelopes"). Word to the wise: Although you'll probably see plenty of animals on the main, paved loop - and might get caught behind a bison traffic jam - turn off onto the numbered dirt roads for even better, and more intimate, sightings.

Prairie dogs - they're big rodents, actually - live in vast underground complexes called "towns," and as you drive past they typically all poke up out of their holes at once, like the world's largest game of Whac-a-Mole.

The other big attraction is the Needles Highway, a narrow, two-lane road that snakes around and among dozens of arrowlike rock spires. It passes through two tunnels, and it behooves you to pay careful attention to the height and width limitations on the signs. Every year vacationers get their oversize RVs and trailers stuck.

Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial

It's etched into your memory from a thousand two-dimensional pictures, TV shows, commemorative stamps and one Alfred Hitchcock movie, but seeing Mount Rushmore up close in three dimensions, as light and shadow dance across 60-foot-high presidential faces, is another thing altogether.

(Full disclosure: I didn't see it at all when I was there last summer; it was fogged in completely. But my wife, Jeri, got a good look two years earlier, and this is based on her observations.)

It was intended by its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, as a shrine to democracy, and most visitors see it as such, but it has always been controversial, not least because the land actually belongs to the Lakota Sioux tribe. Who says so? The U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1980 ruled that the Black Hills had been taken illegally from the Indians and offered them $122 million as compensation. But the Lakota turned the money down. They wanted - and still want - their land back. Ownership of the land today is, in the words of the National Park Service, "still in question."

Which is why it makes sense, in a fair and balanced way, to combine your Rushmore visit with a stop at the Crazy Horse Memorial, half an hour away.

Begun in 1948 and dedicated to the Lakota Sioux leader who triumphed over Custer at Little Big Horn, it was the brainchild of Korczak Ziólkowski, who had been fired from the Rushmore project nine years earlier. When finished - it won't be anytime soon; there are only four drill-blasters working on it - it will dwarf Mount Rushmore, standing 563 feet tall.

You can get a pretty good view of it from the highway, but it costs $10 per adult to enter the site. It costs $4 more for a bus ride to the base of the statue, and $125 to walk along the 225-foot shelf of granite that will one day be Crazy Horse's outstretched right arm. (Rushmore is technically free to visit, but you've got to pay $11 to park.)

The Crazy Horse Memorial has generated its own controversies. For one, no one is sure what the Sioux warrior actually looked like. No confirmed photos of him exist. Second, some members of the Lakota Sioux don't like the idea of this monument any more than they like Rushmore: No matter how good the intention, they say, it's a desecration of their sacred land.

Wind Cave

The Black Hills are honeycombed with world-class caves - who knew? - and Wind Cave is, depending on whom you talk to, either the third- or fourth-longest in the world, stretching for 130 miles, with the majority of it still unexplored. Its name comes from the fact that it inhales and exhales a lot of air through its narrow mouth, depending on the outside barometric pressure.

You won't find many stalactites or stalagmites - saving you the trouble of trying to remember which is which - but you'll see 95 percent of the world's known "boxwork" formations - delicately honeycombed structures of calcite protruding through the walls and ceiling.

Rangers lead a variety of cave tours, from easy walks on paved and electric-lighted underground paths, to "candlelight" tours, to a much longer exploration that involves much crawling and slithering. Claustrophobes: You've been warned.

Mammoth site

In 1974, a Black Hills developer was leveling a hilltop for a new subdivision when his bulldozer unearthed an enormous bone that clearly didn't come from a chicken breast or pork rib. It belonged to a mammoth, one of the hairy, elephant-like creatures that lumbered across the Great Plains in the last Ice Age.

Twenty-six thousand years ago, quite a lot of them went for a dip in an inviting but steep-sided sinkhole, and discovered, much too late, that they couldn't climb out. Their bones were eventually entombed in the dirt of what came to be the Black Hills, and paleontologists from the world over have been extracting them for more than three decades.

To date they've uncovered the skeletons of 58 mammoths, both the woolly and larger Columbian varieties, along with those of prehistoric camels, llamas, lions and the wonderfully named giant short-faced bear.

The dig is enclosed in a large building, and you can tour it, peering over the shoulders of the diggers scraping carefully with their toothbrushes. You can get in there and help excavate through programs offered by Earthwatch and Elderhostel, and there's a daily Junior Paleontologist class for children 4 to 13.

The adjoining museum is worth a visit, especially for the life-size re-creation of an Ice Age house made of mammoth tusks and hides.

Minuteman missile silo

"The Cold War lives on at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site!" exclaims the brochure - perhaps with a bit more glee than is warranted - for the only segment of the national park system dedicated to the beginning of the end of civilization as we knew it.

Here you can peer into the business end of a silo that once housed a nuclear-armed Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile pointed at the old Soviet Union. It and the underground control center 15 miles away are all that's left of a "nuclear missile field," a vast complex of 150 silos and 15 control centers spread over 13,000 square miles of southwest South Dakota.

Opened in 1963, just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, they've all been decommissioned as a result of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed by President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Today the one remaining silo is covered by a glass door - both so tourists can peer in and so Russian spy satellites can confirm we're not up to any funny stuff.

If you go

Getting there

United, Delta, and Frontier Airlines, among others, offer one-stop flights from San Francisco to Rapid City, S.D., connecting through Denver or Salt Lake City.

Where to stay

Hill City is a good base for exploring the Black Hills; Rapid City is better if you want to visit the Badlands and Minuteman site. The South Dakota Tourism website, www.travelsd.com, has accommodation listings; click on "Travel Directory."

Camping is available at Custer State Park, Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park.

What to do

Badlands National Park is south of Interstate 90, near Wall Drug; take exits 110 or 131. Entrance costs $15 per vehicle. (605) 433-5361, www.nps.gov/badl.

Custer State Park is east of Custer on Highway 16. Entrance is $6 per person or $15 per vehicle. www.gfp.sd.gov (follow links).

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is on Highway 244 near Keystone. Entrance is free, but parking costs $11. (605) 574-2523, www.nps.gov/moru.

Crazy Horse Memorial is off Highway 16, north of the town of Custer. Open 7 a.m. to close of nightly laser light show. Admission, $10. American Indians, U.S. military personnel and Boy and Girl Scouts in uniform free. (605) 673.4681, www.crazyhorsememorial.org.

The mammoth site is outside Hot Springs, near Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park. $8 adults, $6 children 5-12. The 90-minute Junior Paleontologist program runs June 1-Aug. 15 and costs an extra $9. Reservations required.

Minuteman Missile National Historic Site: The "contact station," where reserved tours begin, is at exit 131 off Interstate 90, 75 miles east of Rapid City. Ninety-minute tours cover the launch crew living site, the underground control center and the missile silo, which is 15 miles away. Tours are free, but reservations are strongly recommended. (605) 433-5552, www.nps.gov/mimi.

Wind Cave National Park is 6 miles north of Hot Springs, on Highway 385. Underground tours are $7 to $23.

For more information: South Dakota Tourism, (800) 732-5682, www.travelsd.com.