South Dakota's Top 10

The top ten sights, experiences, and destination in South Dakota

??? Badlands National Park - Imagine the grasslands splitting open to reveal an eerie landscape of crumbling pinnacles and ridges banded in gray, yellow, brown, and red and forming a labyrinth of canyons, mesas, and arroyos stretching to the horizon... » FULL STORY

? Mt. Rushmore National Monument - Nothing says "We loved ya, Lincoln," more than carving a 60-foot replica of his august noggin into the short chorus line of truly great presidential heads on a mountainside in the Black Hills... » FULL STORY

??? Custer State Park - When the anonymous cowboy poet of Home on the Range wrote "Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam / Where the deer and the antelope play," he must have been thinking about Custer State Park... » FULL STORY

?? The Black Hills - Wild West culture in one of the most beautiful wooded corners of the nation... » FULL STORY

?? Wind Cave National Park - Miles of underground caverns to explore... » FULL STORY

? Wall Drug - A roadside general store that has built an entire mythos around itself, expanded into one of the largest gift shops I've ever seen, and advertises on billboards for hundreds and hundreds of miles before you ever get there... » FULL STORY

? Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation - On an impromptu pilgrimage to see Wounded Knee on the Oglala Pine Ridge Reservation, my scout troop stumbled across not just any old powwow, but the largest annual tribal gathering of Lakota Sioux in the nation... » FULL STORY

Crazy Horse Monument - Painstakingly chipping away at another Black Hills mountain to craft a statue of the Sioux warrior riding his horse—conveinced as a sort of Native American answer to Mt. Rushmore (not that all local Indians are thrilled by the decades-long project)... » FULL STORY

? The Corn Palace - Giant basketball arena, its walls mosaicked each year with murals done entirely in corn cobs. Well, you got to have something to do to break up the long drive thorugh eastern South Dakota... » FULL STORY

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally - Tens of thousands of choppers descend upon this Western South Dakota town each summer for the largest motorcycle gathering in the country... » FULL STORY

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