The Needles Highway
In the high granite country southwest of Rapid City stand the formations that give the Needles Highway its name, tall, weathered spires of rock thrust up into thin columns and fins by millions of years of erosion. A narrow paved road runs among them, squeezing through gaps barely wide enough for a single vehicle, climbing past pinnacles that lean over the pavement. When the road was first proposed, knowledgeable people called it impossible to build. It opened anyway, in the early 1920s, and it has carried awestruck travelers ever since.
The driving force behind the highway was Peter Norbeck, then governor of South Dakota and the central figure in the shaping of the Black Hills scenic landscape. Norbeck did not want an ordinary mountain road. He wanted one that delivered the visitor directly into the most dramatic granite country in the Hills, threading the spires rather than skirting them, even if that meant a route of impractical narrowness and difficulty. He is said to have scouted parts of the alignment on foot and on horseback, picking his way through the rocks to find a line a road might follow.
Building among the spires
The engineering challenge was real. The country the road had to cross was a maze of standing granite, and the only way through in places was to blast tunnels straight through the rock or to thread the pavement between formations with inches to spare. The work was done with the tools of the era, drilling and dynamite and hard labor, and the crews had to fit the road to the mountain rather than reshaping the mountain to suit the road. Where many highway builders would have chosen the easiest grade, here the difficult line was the whole point.
The tunnels became the signature of the route. Bored through solid granite, they are tight and low, framing the rock and sky beyond and forcing larger vehicles to fold in their mirrors and ease through one at a time. Among the formations along the way is the much-photographed slot known as the Needle’s Eye, a thin gap in a granite wall that gives the highway part of its fame. The whole drive is meant to be slow, a series of curves and squeezes and sudden views that reward patience and punish anyone in a hurry.
A road meant to be savored
The Needles Highway runs through Custer State Park and forms one leg of the larger network of scenic roads that Norbeck championed across the central Hills. Near its higher end it passes close to Sylvan Lake, the mountain lake that Norbeck especially loved, set among granite walls below the highest peaks of the Hills. Together the road and the lake formed the kind of experience he was after, a landscape made accessible without being tamed.
The highway closes in winter, when snow and ice make its tight turns and steep grades unsafe, and it reopens in the warm months when the bulk of visitors arrive. It is not a route for the impatient or for the largest vehicles, and its narrowness and tunnels still surprise drivers accustomed to broad modern highways. That has always been the intent. A road built for speed would have defeated the purpose; this one was built to make people stop, look up, and feel small among the rock.
For Rapid City, the gateway through which most travelers reach this country, the Needles Highway is one of the attractions that justified the journey to the Hills in the first place. It belongs to the same impulse that produced the carved faces of Mount Rushmore and the great preserve of bison to the south, the idea that the Black Hills could be both protected and shown to the world. A century on, the road still does what its builder intended. It carries people slowly into the heart of the granite and leaves them changed by what they have seen.