A field of 50-plus haunting, funny, hand-welded steel sculptures — including a 60-foot bull's head — right off I-90 near Montrose, made by one wonderfully eccentric artist.
Road trips · South Dakota
South Dakota road trips & hidden gems.
The stops worth changing a travel day for in South Dakota — crowd-voted gems, events worth traveling for, and the public golf you can actually book. Curated by Roamward, the scenic road-trip planner.
Happening in South Dakota
Sturgis Motorcycle Rally 2026
Barely two dozen marquee events hit the whole country in a year — and South Dakota has one this August. Roamward builds the trip around it: the scenic route in, the detours worth a slack day, and when rooms sell out.
Closing window — lock lodgingPlan the trip around it →
Hidden gems
What locals say you shouldn’t miss.
Crowd-nominated in the Gem Hunt. Add yours and vote the finalists into the app.
An entire city block of castles, towers, and pyramids built from 4,000 tons of petrified wood in Lemmon, free to walk year-round in the state's remote northwest.
A luminous 50-foot stainless-steel statue of a Lakota woman with a star quilt, glowing above the Missouri River at a rest area in Chamberlain, right off I-90.
An active dig in Hot Springs where you walk over the bones of 60-plus Ice Age mammoths trapped in an ancient sinkhole, a fascinating stop at the edge of the Black Hills.
An exact wooden replica of Norway's 12th-century Borgund stave church, hand-carved and quietly tucked into a pine canyon outside Rapid City.
The Black Hills' oldest attraction, an 1890 indoor pool fed by mineral springs that hold a steady 87 degrees, with 5,000 gallons of warm water flowing through every hour, in the town of Hot Springs.
Worth traveling for
Events that put South Dakota on the calendar.
Plan the South Dakota trip
Get the scenic route, the stops, and the timing.
Roamward turns these into a real road trip — the drive, the detours, and the stays. Join early access for the iOS beta.