Badlands National Park in South Dakota is centrally-located to several sites which make nice side trips where you can spend anywhere from a couple of hours to an entire day.  

Wall Drug

Who has never heard of the famous Wall Drug Store? Or the famous community of Wall, South Dakota? How could you not stop off at a place you see advertised on billboards spaced maybe a mile apart (1.6 km), spanning 650 miles (1,046 km) from Minnesota to Wyoming. And that doesn’t even count the signs people have seen advertising this place in other countries such as Morocco, Amsterdam, and London.

Did you stop off at Wall Drug before continuing your travels along Interstate 90 in South Dakota? / Rebecca Latson

Wall Drug is sort of an oasis in the middle of the South Dakota prairie. There’s a restaurant, art gallery, and small museum. You can purchase groceries, souvenirs, pharmacy items, cowboy boots, and Black Hills Gold jewelry, along with ice cream and ice water. As a matter of fact, free ice and ice water is what started this town on the path to national and international fame.

What is now a booming enterprise just off Interstate 90 began as a struggling business in 1931, out in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota. After graduating pharmacy school in 1929, Ted Husted, his wife Dorothy, and their family struggled to make a go of it in Wall, a little “prairie town” with “only 326 people, 326 poor people. Most of them were farmers who'd been wiped out either by the Depression or drought,” according to Ted Husted writing on the Wall Drug website about how it all started.

With a $3,000 legacy left to Ted by his father, and a brilliant idea by Dorothy to put up signs along the long stretch of hot, treeless highway offering free ice water, Ted and his family built their business from one empty store front in 1931 to a place now visited by 2 million people a year.

How could you not stop off there for an hour or two? In addition to one of the largest selections of Badlands t-shirts anywhere, Wall is the closest place to refuel your car prior to entering Badlands National Park, and to find a room in which to lay your head at night if the in-park lodging and camping options are full.

Minuteman Missile National Historic Site

Although this place is only 21.5 miles (34.6 km) east of Wall on Interstate 90, or a little under 4 miles (6.4 km) north of the Badlands Northeast Entrance booth on South Dakota Highway 240, It would still be easy to drive on past the tall brick and glass building sitting by itself out in the middle of South Dakota mixed-grass prairie, just off the interstate highway. It’s a place essentially “hidden in plain sight,” just like the arsenal of Minuteman nuclear missiles once dotting the prairie and farmlands during the Cold War.

The visitor center at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site / Rebecca Latson

Don’t drive on past. Instead, take Exit 131 off the highway to tour the visitor center, watch the 30-minute video, and walk through the small museum. The visitor center is just one of three sites comprising this repository of nuclear Cold War history.

Click here to read the Traveler article about a visit made to Minuteman Missile National Historic Site.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Surrounded by dark forest and granite rock, Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a carved-in-stone homage to four U.S. presidents embodying the “founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States,” according to sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the man behind the national memorial’s vision.

Mount Rushmore framed by Avenue of the Flags, Mount Rushmore National Memorial / NPS file

George Washington was chosen to represent the birth of the United States. Thomas Jefferson represented the growth of the nation, Theodore Roosevelt represents the development of the United States, and Abraham Lincoln represents the nation’s preservation. From conception to completion, 1923 – 1941, nearly 400 men and women worked in some manner to achieve carving the heads of those four presidents on the side of Mount Rushmore, with an elevation of 5,725 feet (1,745 m). Dynamite, drilling, and hand carving ultimately accomplished what over 2 million visitors a year view upon visiting this national memorial.

Located 83 miles (133.6 km) west from the Pinnacles Entrance of Badlands National Park, Mount Rushmore National Memorial is an easy hour-and-a-half drive. This national memorial can get crowded during summer, and sometimes feels a little “touristy,” according to some visitors, but the feat of creating these faces averaging about 60 feet (18 m) in height from granite is a sight to behold and contemplate.

Wind Cave National Park

The furthest side trip from the Pinnacles Entrance to Badlands National Park is the route east, and then south, to Wind Cave National Park. It’s all on paved road, though, and the 101 miles (162.5 km) distance will take a little under two hours. It’s worth the distance. You’ll see a different environment – one nestled comfortably within South Dakota’s Black Hills – and perhaps enjoy a better opportunity to view and photograph bison, prairie dogs, and pronghorn. Plus, you can choose from several guided tours of the Star of the Show: Wind Cave. The caveat is that all cave tours are currently suspended from May to late fall or early winter 2024, while the park’s cave elevator system is completely replaced and modernized.

Guided tours of Wind Cave will take you through some amazing cave formations like the boxwork on the ceiling pictured here, Wind Cave National Park / Rebecca Latson

While there are other side trip destinations (Sturgis during the town’s motorcycle rally, and Jewel Cave National Monument) from Badlands National Park, these are located further than 100 miles. The three side trips listed here, however, are all worthy of a looksee and under two hours’ drive time.