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Places to go in South Dakota.

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3 places

Badlands National Park Canyons & deserts

Badlands National Park

Interior, SD · High Plains

The Badlands rise from South Dakota's prairie as a maze of sharply eroded buttes, spires, and banded pinnacles, the layers stacked in stripes of rust, gold, and gray. Walk the boardwalk-and-scramble Door Trail straight into the formations near Interior, or drive the Badlands Loop Road for bighorn sheep, bison, and prairie dogs. The park also guards one of the world's richest fossil beds, where ancient horses and saber-toothed cats once roamed.

Wind Cave National Park Caves

Wind Cave National Park

Hot Springs, SD · Black Hills

Wind Cave protects one of the world's longest and most complex caves beneath the South Dakota prairie, named for the wind that whistles through its natural entrance as pressure shifts. Below ground it holds the planet's largest concentration of rare boxwork, a honeycomb of thin calcite fins. Above, a mixed-grass prairie shelters bison, elk, and prairie dogs at the edge of the Black Hills.

Jewel Cave National Monument Caves

Jewel Cave National Monument

Custer, SD · Black Hills

Jewel Cave earns its name underground, where calcite crystals known as nailhead and dogtooth spar glitter across walls that wind on for more than 220 mapped miles, making this the second longest cave in the United States and a place geologists are still actively surveying. The lit Scenic Tour drops you in by elevator to a half mile loop past draped flowstone, delicate boxwork, and ribbons of formation the rangers call cave bacon, while the Historic Lantern Tour hands you a real lantern and walks the rough, early passages the way the first explorers saw them. It is a working scientific frontier dressed as a sightseeing stop, a quiet 13 miles west of Custer in the Black Hills.