Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota, United States

5Michele P 5:00 PM Sep 14, 2022

Intricate Formations
We took the Natural Entrance tour. Our tour guide Abby was excellent! This tour takes you down through the caves to view the various formations including the popcorn, frost and box cut which was very intricate and different from anything else I have seen in other caves. The gallery is interesting and worth the walk through before the tour. I would recommend buying your tickets on line ahead of time if you don’t want to spend a lot of time waiting around. We arrived at 9:20 (on a Weekday) and the first available of any tour was 11:30. After purchasing our tour tickets, we were able to drive around the rest of the park and enjoy the views-including several bison! Enjoyable and worth the ride.

5LBinTX 5:00 PM Jun 21, 2022

Above and Below Ground
One unique thing about this cave, compared to others we've been to, is that there are things to see above ground as well! A herd of bison greeted us shortly after we entered the property, including a couple of calves, which was very cool. We arrived 30 minutes early for our 8:45am tour, as instructed, and checked in to get our tickets and pick up a Junior Rangers book. The Ranger who helped us just so happened to be our tour guide as well as the person to award my son his Junior Ranger badge, so she was a common thread through the day. Even though this is apparently the first summer she's worked Wind Cave, she was very knowledgeable and good at her job. We did the "Fairgrounds" tour in the morning and very much enjoyed it. It does list this tour as "moderately strenuous" due to the number of stairs (~450), but they are spaced out nicely and we didn't feel pushed at all. Older folks on our tour didn't seem to have an issue either. The stairs and trails inside are well maintained and the lighting is great to pick up the natural formations without the necessity of a flash on your camera. This cave is home to 90% of the "boxwork" cave formations in the world, and there is a lot of it, so very cool to see in person. Above ground, we opted to stick near the visitor center, which has a very nice display downstairs, including a map of the cave with the (sometimes silly or crazy) names of the pathways. Then we ventured on the 1 mile Prairie Vista trail. It wasn't marked well at all from the visitor center, so my husband asked where the tail head was. It's technically down a little ways and we were advised to either drive the 1/4 mile and park in a small lot, or walk the opposite way of the cave out the back door and down the paved path to it. We weren't sure what the parking situation was down the road, so we walked it and it was a nice way to do so - that way we could see the natural entrance. If you walk straight on that path, you will come to the cave founder's gravesite at the end of the walk. If that's all you want to see, head up the stairs at the beginning of the path and it'll be a very short trip for you (it was not marked on the map we had). The gift shop was very nice. We purchased an art print by the Charley Harper estate - a bison - whose cost goes directly to helping conserve the bison herd on site. We very much enjoyed our visit here and would highly recommend it to anyone visiting the area!