59 Parks: Wind Cave

Wind Cave National Park is located on the West side of South Dakota.

You have to sign up and pay for a tour to see the actual cave. (Shocking they won't let people wander aimlessly through a cave, I know *heavy sarcasm*) The surrounding area is beautiful as well and you might be able to view some bison roaming nearby.

This was my first tour of a cave. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be given my slight claustrophobia, but I also took a standard tour. They had plenty of paved pathways and lights hooked up throughout. I'm not someone that would sign up for the "crawling required in certain areas" tour. No thank you.

This park/tour is one you'd really need to experience yourself rather than rely on someone's photos. I did my best to capture it in pictures, but caves aren't really the most photogenic of subjects. It tended to look a lot like dark, damaged, cardboard and requiring a lot of adjusting to show up in photos. Highly recommend.

One really neat thing about this experience is, I met a couple elder women from England on the tour, and I asked them how the heck they ended up in South Dakota doing a cave tour. They said they were touring National Parks in America. The awe they had for how big and open everything in America is was a nice reframe of perspective for me. It's easy to take for granted wide open roads, and some of the vast stretches of land here.