The railroad that opened the interior of the Black Hills ran from Deadwood down to Edgemont through Lead, Rochford, Hill City, Custer and Pringle, and it stopped carrying traffic in the middle 1980s. Rather than let the corridor break up among the landowners it crossed, the state railbanked it, which is the legal device that keeps a right of way whole after the rails come up. Governor George Mickelson pushed the conversion through as the first rails to trails project in South Dakota, and the first stretch opened in 1991. He was killed in a plane crash on 19 April 1993 and the trail took his name. It was finished in September 1998. It runs a hundred and nine miles on crushed limestone and gravel, over more than a hundred converted railroad bridges and through four rock tunnels between Hill City and Rochford, with fifteen trailheads along it. Because it is a rail grade rather than a footpath for the most part it stays under a four percent gradient, and it falls something like eleven hundred and fifty feet from the Deadwood end to the Edgemont end. The longest continuous climb is the nineteen miles up out of Deadwood to Dumont. Pringle, a village of about a hundred people with a post office and a bar, is one of the towns it threads.
Getting there
43.6086, -103.5938
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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