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The Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota: Outdoors and Cultural Attractions

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South Dakota’s Black Hills and Badlands make the case for one of America’s great road-trip detours.

Brand USA’s tourism campaign Visit The USA built an entire promotional feature, “The Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota: Outdoors and Cultural Attractions,” around the western corner of the state that most cross-country drivers only see from the interstate. The video moves between eroded rock formations, pine forests, free-roaming bison herds and two of the largest carved monuments on the planet. It’s a travel pitch, but the geography and history behind it are real enough to justify the itinerary.

• Badlands National Park’s sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and layered rock sit alongside Custer State Park’s granite spires, Sylvan Lake and free-roaming American bison herds.
• Black Hills National Forest covers more than 1.2 million acres of pine-covered peaks and canyons stretching across western South Dakota into northeastern Wyoming.
• Mount Rushmore, carved by Gutzon Borglum into the likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, sits roughly 20 minutes from the still-unfinished Crazy Horse Memorial honoring the Oglala Lakota leader.

The Badlands’ Eroded Terrain

The video’s opening ground is Badlands National Park, where wind and water have carved the buttes into sharp pinnacles and striped rock walls over millions of years. The footage lingers on the layered formations that give the park its otherworldly look, the kind of landscape that draws hikers and photographers who want scenery unlike anything else in the Midwest. It’s a stark contrast to the pine forest that surrounds it just a short drive west.

Custer State Park and the Black Hills National Forest

From the Badlands, the feature shifts to Custer State Park, known for its granite spires, Sylvan Lake and herds of bison that roam freely across the park’s Wildlife Loop Road. That park sits inside the larger Black Hills National Forest, which spans more than 1.2 million acres of pine-covered peaks and canyons across western South Dakota and into northeastern Wyoming. Anyone planning a longer western swing through this territory would find plenty to compare it to on a route like the one covered in California to New York: A Complete Road Trip.

Mount Rushmore’s Presidential Carving

The centerpiece cultural stop is Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Gutzon Borglum’s sculpture depicting Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved directly into the granite face of the mountain. The video treats it as the anchor of the entire trip, the single image most people already associate with South Dakota before they ever see the Badlands or Custer State Park footage that surrounds it.

The Crazy Horse Memorial’s Unfinished Ambition

Not far from Rushmore is the Crazy Horse Memorial, an ongoing private carving project honoring the Oglala Lakota leader, begun by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. Unlike Rushmore, it’s not a government project and it’s still being carved decades after work began.

The massive sculpture of the legendary Native American leader is slated to become the largest in the world when it is completed.

That scale is the whole draw — visitors aren’t watching a finished monument, they’re watching one still being cut out of the mountain in real time.

Rapid City as the Gateway

Rapid City functions as the hub the video keeps circling back to, the jumping-off point for reaching Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Custer State Park and the Badlands without driving hours between stops. For travelers weighing how to structure a national-park-heavy loop, the region pairs well with other outdoor-driven trip planning covered under Outdoors or the broader Trip Ideas Travel Guide coverage.

Crazy Horse has been in progress since the 1940s with no fixed completion date, which is exactly why Visit The USA keeps it in the frame — it’s a monument you can visit today and still watch change on your next trip.