Western Trip Part 7 Custer State Park

If you look at a map of South Dakota, in the southern Black Hills you will see a patch of land labeled Custer State Park. Custer is one of the largest state parks in the lower 48. I don't know how I heard about it many years ago, but have wanted to go there for as long as I can remember. If you do look at the map, you will see Custer, Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and Wind Cave in a small area. This makes for a very fun, scenic vacation. All of this is true, but distances are larger than they appear. It was a couple hours from Mt. Rushmore to our campsite.

We stayed 3 days at the campsite in one of the four campgrounds. There is a lot of wildlife. Like the Badlands, there is a bison herd.They are left alone all year except in September when there is a round up. Extra individuals are sold off. There are also mountain lions and rattlesnakes. On one of our hikes a rattler was in the rocks in front of us. We were warned by other hikers, but we could not find it. We did see a foot print of a mountain lion on the same hike. However, finding mule deer and pronghorn was easy. Also, we saw a herd of elk. The elk are not known to go anywhere near people at the park. However at dusk one night we saw the whole herd, albeit, half a mile away.

Lastly, there are wild donkeys in the park. They do come up to people and beg for food. They even  coordinate efforts where one will block the road, while others stick their head through your window. The park, puts up with the wild donkeys, but by my conversations, do not seem to like them much.

Within the first five minutes of driving into the park we saw the first three photos.

Turkey Vulture

This was the first yellow bellied marmot we
had ever seen

Thirteen Lined Ground Squirrel

                                       The donkeys as you can see, have no fear

As promised in an earlier post, the pictures of pronghorn got better. We saw hundreds on our trip. The best photo ops for them were in Custer

Don't know why this deer was in this little roadside mud pond, maybe to get flies off of her

                                     Two pronghorn males practicing for mating season

Upland Sandpiper

Photos are in the order taken

The Elk Herd, he were very excited to see them.
We had no idea how many opportunities
we would have to see any more

This was our campsite in an actual campground. We even got reservations months in advance. There is a brook right behind the trees. The bathroom and shower were only a few yards away. Since we had gone a week without being near a real bathroom never mind a shower AND it being a hundred degrees in the Badlands we were dirty! When I showered, the bottom of the tub ran dirty for the first couple minutes. Of the places we actually paid to camp, this was my favorite campground and campsite.

                                                      Mountain Bluebird

 The campground unlike the one in the Badlands is fenced in. The reason? The bison herd comes by and eats the grass outside the fence every few days. As we were packing up our last morning, sure enough there they were.