Custer State Park, South Dakota

This post is dedicated to our daughter, Kelly. She took the time to get us many unique gifts on Christmas last year for our road trip this summer. One of the things was a book entitled: "USA On The Road" by Insight Guides. This book introduced us to the Iron Mountain Road. An excerpt:

"Going on past Rapid City and all the rampant commercialism of US 16, you'll encounter a road of another color, a 17-mile corkscrew known as the Iron Mountain Road. It is one of the spectacular, specially engineered Black Hills highways built in the 1930s and intended for pleasure driving. The inspiration of Highway Commissioner Peter Norbeck, the roads are characterized by hairpin turns, switchbacks, granite tunnels (placed to provide remarkable vistas) and pigtail bridges using native pin column in place of steel..."

Within the Iron Mountain Road, is the Needles Highway (SD 87).
Custer State Park is in the Black Hills.

• It encompasses 71,000 acres
• Much wildlife including 1,300 buffalo
• State Game Lodge, served as the summer White House for President Calvin Coolidge

Let's take this one incident. It was a double tunnel thru the rocks with a wooden bridge on the end.
This is what you approach: (looks like a cave Osama bin laden might have been in...lol)


You enter the tunnel.



Come out the tunnel, go across a wooden bridge, and the road turns to the right



and you drive under the bridge you just went over