six nights on granite, pine country, and one car you drive yourself
A Dog Friendly Black Hills Vacation Package Built Around a Cabin in the Pines
This dog friendly Black Hills vacation package puts you in a self catering cabin off a forest road with your own car, six nights, and two named stops on the week where your dog waits in the party's hands instead of yours.
Six nights, from $1,860 per person.
Nothing here counts you and nothing follows you off the page. One word can be stored, and only the word yes, so this slip stops coming back. The whole of what that means.
The granite in the Black Hills is about 1.7 billion years old, and it comes out of the ponderosa in fins and knuckles you can see from the road at forty miles an hour. That is the first thing worth knowing, because it means the walking here is short and steep rather than long and flat, which suits a lot of dogs and defeats some. The second thing worth knowing is that the Black Hills National Forest, 1.2 million acres of it, takes leashed dogs on its trails, and that is the ground this whole week is built on. A dog friendly Black Hills vacation package works here for one reason: most of what you would want to do is open, and the two things that are not are known in advance.
We put you in a whole cabin, not a room. Usually within fifteen minutes of Hill City, on a spur off a forest service road, two or three bedrooms, a kitchen you cook in and a yard with a gate. The car is yours to drive. Nobody else's schedule touches yours.
Six nights is the right length because the hills are compact but the driving is not quick. Nothing here is more than about seventy miles from anything else, but the roads through the middle of the range are switchbacked and slow, and the tunnels on the scenic route north of Custer are narrow enough that a full size pickup with a rooftop box has to think about it. Plan on thirty five miles an hour as an honest average once you leave the highway.
- How far the dog comes
- Your dog is with you for every mile of driving, every trail on national forest ground, the cabin and its lot, and every meal you eat outside; two ticketed attractions are the exception and total about five hours.
- What is actually included
- Six nights in a whole self catering cabin, two or three bedrooms, with a fenced or gated yard confirmed in writing before deposit; a dog on the booking at no nightly surcharge, agreed with the owner in advance rather than disclosed at check in; a printed road book of forest service roads, trailhead parking sizes and creek access points; the two attraction tickets for the human members of the party; a shaded outdoor table at the cabin; firewood for the season you travel.
- What the dog is shut out of
- Two items, named now, roughly five hours across the week. The cave tour on the southern end of the hills runs about ninety minutes underground on stairs and ladders, and no dog goes below the surface on any tour offered there. The carved granite monument allows dogs on the parking structure and the outer walk only, not on the terrace, the trail below the carving or inside the buildings, which is about three hours if you take the museum and the sculptor's studio. On both, one adult stays with the dog: at the cave there is a shaded picnic ground with pines and a stream about four hundred yards from the tour building, and at the monument the top deck of the parking structure has open air and a view of the same carving. Everything else on the itinerary was checked against the current forest and state rules: national forest trails here take leashed dogs, most state park ground here takes leashed dogs, and both are written into the road book with the leash length each one asks for.
- What it does not include
- Getting yourself to Rapid City, whether you fly and rent or drive your own car from home; the rental car and its fuel, which runs 300 to 450 miles over six days on this itinerary; all food, both groceries for the cabin and any meal out; state park entrance fees, which are per vehicle and not per person; the second attraction ticket if a second adult wants to take the cave tour on a different day; any pet deposit the owner holds against damage, refundable and paid direct; anything your own veterinarian handles, which is yours to arrange and not something this office does.
- Who should not book this
- A dog that cannot settle in a car for two to three hours at a stretch, because the good ground here is spread across sixty miles of road. Anyone hoping to leave the dog somewhere while they take a full day in Rapid City, since we do not arrange that and will not. Walkers who want flat ground: the trails that make this trip worth taking climb 400 to 900 feet over rock and loose granite grit, and the ridge routes have long stretches with no shade at all.
The cabin, the yard, and what the ground under your boots is actually like
The cabins we book are private lets, one party at a time, and every one has been asked the same three questions in writing: is the yard fenced or gated and how high, is a dog on the booking without a nightly surcharge, and what is the surface of the parking area. That last one matters more than people expect. Gravel washboard on a steep pull-in is the difference between a dog who jumps out happily on night one and one who does not.
The ground is ponderosa pine on decomposed granite. It drains fast, so the trails are dry within a few hours of a summer thunderstorm, and it is coarse and gritty underfoot, closer to walking on coffee grounds than on dirt. Creek crossings on the central drainages are ankle deep most of the summer and knee deep in June. Water is the thing to plan around on the ridge walks, where you can go four miles without crossing anything, and every trailhead in the road book is marked for whether there is water on the route or none at all.
Ticks are present from April through about July, heaviest in May and June, and grass burs turn up on the drier southern trails in late summer. Those are facts about the ground, and how you deal with them on your own dog is a conversation for your own veterinarian, not for this office. What we do is tell you which trails have the tall grass and which are rock the whole way.
from $1,860per person
- Behind the number
- The least this office has paid to put a party into this week during the past year, not a rate card.
- Counted how
- Per head, two sharing, one dog, and that dog's lodging supplement folded in here instead of appearing at the door.
- Pushes it up
- Taking a whole place rather than a room, bringing a second dog, a holiday week, a property that prices by the size of the animal, and deciding late.
- Goes firm
- The moment a property puts its own name to a written line saying it will take your dog on those exact dates.
You settle up with the property itself, through whatever system it happens to use. None of it routes through this office and no card is ever shown to anybody here.
When the hills are worth six nights, and the two weeks to stay away from
Late May through late June is the best walking of the year here: the creeks are full, the grass is green rather than tan, and afternoon highs sit in the low seventies at elevation. July and August bring afternoon thunderstorms that build over the higher ground around two in the afternoon and clear by five, which is easy to plan around if you walk early.
The one hard exception is the motorcycle rally in early August, when the roads through the middle of the range carry hundreds of thousands of visitors and the noise on the scenic routes is continuous from dawn to well after dark. This offer is not sold for those dates at all. We do not quote them, and if your only free week falls there, we will tell you to come in September instead.
- May
- creeks high, ticks active, highs in the sixties at 6,000 feet
- Mid June to early July
- best trail conditions, long light until nine, cabins book earliest
- Early August
- rally weeks, roads at capacity, this trip is not offered
- September
- dry, clear, highs in the seventies, aspen turning by the last week
- October
- frosts most nights, some forest roads gated after the middle of the month
What gets pinned down before you pay anything
Nothing goes on a card until the cabin has answered in writing about the dog and the yard. That is the whole point of the sequence below, and it is why a figure takes two to four working days rather than coming back the same afternoon.
- AskYou send the dates, the size of the party and one honest line about how your dog handles a car and a stranger's yard
- CheckWe contact cabins that fit and get the dog terms, the fence height and the parking surface in writing, then price the week
- FigureYou get one number per person with the two attraction tickets itemized, plus a note on which day suits the cave and which the monument
- ConfirmDeposit to the cabin owner direct, road book sent, and the two closed items marked on the calendar with the hours they cost
Lead with whatever you think will be a problem
If there is something about your dog that would make this week difficult, say it in the first message rather than the fourth. We would rather tell you this is the wrong trip than sell you six nights you spend managing a problem. A message is read the same working day.