The George S. Mickelson Trail
The trail follows a railroad that is no longer there. For more than a hundred miles, the George S. Mickelson Trail runs along the grade once used by trains hauling ore, timber, and passengers through the Black Hills, threading the length of the range from the southern grasslands up into the high pine country and on toward the northern gold towns. The rails and ties are gone, lifted when the line was abandoned, but the route they left behind, a gentle, graded path cut and built for trains, made an almost ready-made corridor for walking and cycling once someone thought to use it that way.
The railroads came to the interior Hills to serve the mining boom. As gold mining grew from the loose gravels of the placer camps into the deep hard-rock operations centered on Lead and the Homestake mine, the industry needed reliable ways to move heavy freight in and out of rugged country. Lines were pushed up the canyons and over the divides, including the famously crooked Crouch Line that climbed Rapid Canyon, and the grades were engineered to keep their climbs gradual so that locomotives could manage the loads. Those gentle gradients, an asset for the trains, would later be exactly what made the route so pleasant on foot or on a bicycle.
A railroad becomes a trail
By the latter part of the twentieth century, the mining that had justified the railroads was winding down, and the lines through the Hills no longer carried enough traffic to survive. When a route is abandoned, the corridor can easily be broken up and lost, parceled out among adjoining landowners until the through route disappears. Instead, South Dakota took the approach that had worked elsewhere in the country, converting the abandoned grade into a public recreation trail. The effort took years and required acquiring the corridor, building trailheads, surfacing the path, and reusing or rebuilding the structures along the way.
The result became the state’s premier rail-trail. It was named for George S. Mickelson, a South Dakota governor who championed the project and who died in office in an airplane crash in the early 1990s, a loss felt across the state. Carrying his name, the trail opened in stages and was eventually completed along nearly the whole length of the old grade, a continuous route of well over a hundred miles running through the heart of the Hills.
What the trail crosses
Travelers on the trail move through a cross section of the Black Hills. The path passes through forest and meadow, alongside streams, and across the open parks where the pines thin out. It runs through old railroad tunnels blasted through rock and over many trestles and bridges that once carried the trains across gulches and creeks, structures rebuilt to safe standard for trail use. The grade links a string of communities along its length, so that a rider can travel between towns much as a passenger might once have done by rail, stopping along the way at the small places the railroad once served.
Because it follows a rail grade, the trail never climbs steeply, which puts it within reach of a wide range of people. Families on bicycles, walkers, runners, horseback riders, and in winter those on skis and snowshoes all use it, and the gentle grades mean that even the long climbs up toward the high country are manageable rather than punishing. Each year the trail also hosts organized rides that draw people from across the region and beyond to travel its full length over a few days, a kind of pilgrimage along the old railroad.
The Mickelson Trail belongs to a larger story about what becomes of industrial landscapes once their original purpose is spent. The Black Hills are full of such second lives, from a gold mine turned into a deep physics laboratory to floodplains turned into parks. The railroads were built to haul wealth out of the Hills, and when that work ended, the corridors they had carved through difficult country became something the builders never imagined, a long quiet path that lets people travel the length of the range under their own power, following the route the trains once took.