My wife Ginger and I got up early our first day in South Dakota to take a hike in Wind Cave National Park and get me back in time for the Jewel Cave tour. I wanted to hike the 4-mile Highland-Centennial loop. The park is really nice above ground, all prairie and rolling hills.
There are not many trees, just grassland. Also, there is a wild buffalo herd living in the park – we saw dozens, maybe even hundreds of them just driving in. We also saw a few on the hike, which was very cool. They’re huge, majestic animals. We also saw an antelope at a distance and several prairie dog towns. Prairie dogs are cute little guys who yip at you when you get close. And the ones in the park didn't seem all that threatened by people, and let us get pretty close:
However, after we’d hiked maybe 1.5-2 miles, a huge buffalo was laying right in the trail. All the park signs warned us to stay 30 yards away from buffalo, and we were running out of time anyway. We just turned around so we wouldn’t bother it. Tangling with a buffalo is very, very dumb. A few years later, I would observe this first hand in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (It didn't happen to me, thankfully.)
Wild Cave Tour
Wind Cave's Wild Cave Tour is more beautiful but much less challenging than that of nearby Jewel Cave. Both are wonderful tours and well worth the trip! The group for this day's wild tour tour was me, two guys who knew each other, and a group of five young women who also all knew each other. We clicked as a group right away, as if we were all old friends, and that really made the tour fun. Just waiting in line to buy park passes, in a few seconds we all managed to exchange cash with each other and hand the exact amount for all of us to one person, who bought all our passes at once and sped up our tour. (Thankfully, she didn't take all of our money and just run off.) Wind Cave is an amazing place to see, and not easy to describe. It's very decorated, but not the way most caves are. Wind Cave (named for the powerful wind blasting out of the tiny hole which was its original natural entrance) is full of boxwork, a kind of formation which is very rare elsewhere but very common in Wind Cave. Boxwork will not be easy to describe, and I either forgot my camera for this tour or they weren't allowed. Imagine a complicated hedge maze, with rows of hedges running not just vertically and horizontally, but also diagonally, and always in straight lines. Now turn that hedge maze upside down, attach it the ceiling, shrink it to accommodate bugs instead of people, and make it out of rock. Does that help? Probably not. But it's a very neat thing to see. Probably the most challenging spot on the Wind Cave wild tour was, early on, a nearly vertical climb up a jagged rock chute. If memory serves, it was about 20-25 feet straight up. There was also a slide through the tightest part – which was not in fact very tight – which we took sliding on our backs down a muddy slope. Here we are afterwards. There wasn't that much crawling, so we're actually not THAT dirty for just finishing caving!
This is a fun, relaxing wild cave tour. I'd say its difficulty is about 4/10, certainly not very difficult. There is little crawling and climbing. If you want a challenge, go to nearby Jewel Cave instead. This one, however, is more scenic!