South Dakota Rock Climbing

We knew that there would be tons of great rock climbing in SD, and we made it a point to plan for a lot of days on which we would do this. The way K put it, we would “climb our brains out.” Of the 11 days that we were in SD, we climbed on 6 days so we were pretty pleased by this. One of these was the day of guided climbing with Sylvan Rocks and another was the day we went back and climbed the route on the Aquarium again on our own, both of which we talked about in a previous post.

We had bought a useful little climbing guide written by Sylvan Rocks on the Needles area, and K got to talking with a guy at our campground, who works and lives in the area, and he also gave us one of his guide books which was really nice of him. Armed with this info, as well as talking with some local climbers that we happened to see setting up on a route as well as another climber and his girlfriend, in town from Minnesota, we picked up some good beta and got quite a bit more climbing in.

(Hier sind weitere Bilder vom Klettern in Custer State Park, South Dakota.)

We did some climbing in the Inner Outlets and Outer Outlets, as well as a quick little route on the back side of the rocks adjacent to the dam at Sylvan Lake.

It was neat to pop over the top of the rocks near the dam, and have a view over the lake. The drawback to this route was that it was right on a main path, and numerous tourists stopped to watch and ask questions. We were featured in countless photos while doing this route.

The following pictures are from some routes up Rhinoceros Rock. We climbed the routes to the top as a single pitch, but then descended via a two stage rappel as there were two sets of anchors to accommodate our 60m rope.

We also went back and climbed Spire #4 of the Cathedral Spires again on our own. This route has been our favorite so far!

Again, we really have had to marvel at how we had most of the climbing areas either entirely or almost all to ourselves. We are used to East coast climbing where the crags are crowded and the people are crawling all over you. This has been awesome and we are looking forward to the next place on our trip that we can go climbing!