BLACK HILLS COMMUNITY INFO

These are the fabled Black Hills of South Dakota, an oasis of pine-clad mountains on the Great Plains. The Black Hills offer everything you expect from a mountain vacation: five national parks, scenic drives, waterfalls, abundant wildlife, acclaimed recreation trails and trout fishing. A place where bison and wild horses still roam free.

The Black Hills are a small, isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains of North America in western South Dakota and extending into Wyoming, USA. Set off from the main body of the Rocky Mountains, the region is something of a geological anomaly-accurately described as an "island of trees in a sea of grass." The Black Hills encompass the Black Hills National Forest and are home to the tallest peaks of continental North America east of the Rockies.

Native Americans have a long (but scantily documented) human history in the Black Hills. When gold was discovered in 1874, a gold rush swept the area prompting the US government to re-assign the local Native Americans to other reservations in western South Dakota. Unlike the rest of the Dakotas, the Black Hills were settled primarily from population centers to the west and south of the region, as miners flocked there from earlier gold boom locations in Colorado and Montana.

Today, the nearby reservations and Ellsworth Air Force Base make for a unique diversity in population different from that of the rest of Wyoming or South Dakota. As the economy of the Black Hills has shifted from natural resources (mining and timber), the hospitality and tourism industry has grown to take its place. The major tourist spots include Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, Crazy Horse Memorial, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.