Wind Cave National Park

Come here for boxwork, delicate fins of rock in a honeycomb pattern, a rare cave feature and the reason geology fans make the trip to South Dakota. Wind Cave is not a stalactite showcase, and visitors expecting a Carlsbad-style forest of dripstone can leave underwhelmed; what it offers instead is one of the most complex caves in the world, ranked by the park as the seventh-longest. Every visit is ranger-guided. The range runs from a 30-minute accessibility tour with no stairs, riding the elevator in and out, to the summer-only Wild Cave Tour for people happy to crawl; the year-round Garden of Eden tour, an hour with 150 stairs, is the gentle standard choice. The rebuilt elevators have carried tours again since January 28, 2025.