June 28, 2015 - Custer State Park

We drove on the Iron Mountain Road toward Mt. Rushmore area to cover the last portion of scenery highway in Custer State Park.

On the way there, we passed by a horse farm with beautiful horses on the road side which provided us good opportunities of taking pictures with these horses.

There are 3 tunnels on this road built purposely to allow travelers to see the Mt. Rushmore Presidential Faces through the tunnels.  It was interesting and made you wonder the magical skills of the engineers who designed these tunnels.  

Then we went back to the Custer State Park to visit the Stockade Lake and the Bismarck lake. There are trails along the lakes for us to visit and they are easy trails for us to enjoy the sceneries.

Then, we visited the Mt. Coolidge Firetower Overlook.  It is the highest point of Custer State Park and it has a ranger station, and microwave/cellular towers.  At a clear day, one shall be able to see the Black Hills National Forest on the west side and Badlands National Park on the east side.  Unfortunately, it was raining nearby and we had limited view.  But the thundering in the distance did look impressive.  The ranger advised us to get down the hill as soon as possible to avoid the bad weather hitting this hill top.  It would be difficult to drive down the hill during bad weather.  

We were planning to give the wildlife Loop Road another try to spot some animals such as bisons.  Since we did not see much the other day when we drove on the loop road itself, so we decided to get off the loop road and turn left on the Oak Draw Road (unpaved road) to try our luck.  When we got to the intersection of North Lame Johnny Road, we still did not spot anything.  Our plan at that time was to continue on the Oak Draw Road to the Wildlife Visitor Center to ask rangers.  Just as we passed the intersection, Peggy noticed a lot of black spots on the prairie and asked Fei to identify those black spots.  Turned out it was a large herd of bisons.  Our estimates was about 700-800+ bisons.  We immediately turned back onto the North Lame Johnny Road and stayed there for about an hour.  These bisons were just roaming around the prairie, eating grass, and occasionally crossing the road, wondering passing right next to our car.  This was the first time we have seen so many bisons at such close distance.  It was definitely the highlight of our Custer State Park visit.