Keep your camera handy for photos of bison, great posers standing up or taking a break in the grass, Wind Cave National Park / Rebecca Latson

Bison, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and the third longest cave in the United States. You’ll find all this and more when you visit Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, where there is as much to see and do above ground as there is below.

This national park sits amidst the rolling mixed-grass prairie and ancient rocks of the southern Black Hills, so named because the predominance of ponderosa pine darkens the hillsides. The metamorphic rocks shaping this landscape are old – almost 2 billion years in age - formed by intense heat and pressure during a mountain building episode.  

Now known as Wind Cave, it’s been called different names such as the Lakota “Oniya Oshoka", where the earth "breathes inside.” For centuries, Sioux tribes, Apache, and Arapaho peoples trod the grasslands and forested hills above this windy hole in the ground. They knew about the cave but whether they explored its depths is unknown. It wasn’t until 1881, when brothers Tom and Jesse Bingham investigated a loud whistling sound as the wind blew out from a hole in the ground, that exploration of the currently-167-mile-long cave (269 kilometers) began to be documented. Alvin McDonald became the most well-known of early cave explorers, discovering about 8-10 miles (13-16 km) of passageways.

Landowners saw opportunity in monetizing the cave by conducting tours through the passages for the ever-growing curious public. In 1903, 13 years prior to the establishment of the National Park Service, Wind Cave National Park was designated by Theodore Roosevelt as the eighth national park and the first to protect a cave.

Wind Cave is a “breathing” (aka barometric) cave. Air moves in or out of the cave, equalizing the atmospheric pressures of cave and outside air. When the air pressure is higher outside the cave than inside it, air flows into the cave. When the air pressure inside the cave is higher than outside, air flows out of the cave. Park staff have clocked the wind flow at the walk-in entrance of the cave at over 70 miles per hour.

Photogenic bison alone or in herds rest upon and graze the hills next to the park road, often halting traffic as they saunter that asphalt ribbon from one feeding spot to another. Tear your eyes away from those shaggy behemoths and you’ll notice acres of discolored dirt mounds signaling the existence of prairie dog towns. Stop at a pullout or parking area to watch the social habits of these adorable relatives to the squirrel as they greet their neighbors with a kiss, whistle a warning, or perform the “jump-yip” maneuver to (theoretically) test the “stranger danger” awareness of those same neighbors. While driving the park road, keep your eyes peeled for pronghorn, North America’s fastest land mammal found nowhere else in the world.

While you can hike more than 30 miles (48.3 km) of trails over prairie and through pine to enjoy views of the Black Hills, it’s the lure of subterranean passageways that brings most visitors to the park. If you haven’t already purchased a ticket and reserved a spot through recreation.gov on one of six popular guided cave tours (two of which are offered only during the summer), you may purchase a ticket at the Wind Cave visitor center (if there are any available). These tours range from the easy Accessibility Tour lasting 30 minutes, to the strenuous Wild Cave Tour lasting 4 hours. The park recently upgraded the cave’s elevator system and tours have resumed after an almost year-long hiatus. During your subterranean sojourn, you’ll learn about cave geology while admiring the delicate calcite formations (aka speleothems) such as boxwork, frostwork, stalactites, and stalagmites decorating Wind Cave’s passageways. To get a flavor for these cave tours, you can read Traveler Founder and Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek’s 2018 experiences touring Wind Cave as well as Jewel Cave at Jewel Cave National Monument. Remember to bring your camera with you to capture photos of Wind Cave’s speleothems. You can read Traveler contributing photographer Rebecca Latson’s article on achieving great cave photos despite the low-light conditions.

After a day of exploring Wind Cave National Park both topside and below ground, you might want to call it a night and pitch a tent in the park’s only campground. Who knows? Maybe you’ll wake up to a bison lounging nearby.

Traveler’s Choice for: Caving, geology, photography, wildlife