Peter Norbeck was governor of South Dakota from 1917 to 1921 and a United States senator from 1921 until his death in 1936, and the roads through Custer State Park are as much his monument as anything he did in the legislature. Game, Fish and Parks records that he marked the entire course of the Needles Highway on foot and on horseback before it was built, and it opened in 1922. Iron Mountain Road, finished by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, was routed the same way, over the peak rather than around it, on the argument that the scenery was the point and the mileage was not. His instruction survives: this is not meant to be a super highway, and to do the scenery justice a driver should manage no more than twenty miles an hour. The tunnels are why both roads are remembered. Five of them are cut single lane through solid granite, and the state publishes the sizes to the inch: the Needles Eye at eight feet by nine feet nine, Iron Creek at eight feet nine by ten feet ten, and on Iron Mountain Road the Doane Robinson, C. C. Gideon and Scovel Johnson tunnels, none of them wider than twelve feet. Gideon introduced the spiral pigtail bridge on the same road in 1932, building it from heavy timber rather than concrete to keep it rustic. The Park Service says the Iron Mountain tunnels frame Mount Rushmore, and that the framing only works for traffic heading north. Whether Norbeck aimed them at it is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere.
Getting there
43.8682, -103.4348
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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