Spearfish

We rolled into Spearfish at the northern edge of the Black Hills expecting a pass-through town and instead found ourselves staying two extra nights. The town itself sits at the mouth of Spearfish Canyon, a slot of limestone and pine that the locals treat the way coastal towns treat their beaches — as the reason everything else exists. Lia rolled the windows down the moment we turned onto the byway, and neither of us said much for the next twenty minutes, just watched the canyon walls close in around Spearfish Creek.

Driving the byway

Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway climbs nineteen miles from town up toward Cheyenne Crossing, and it might be the most underrated drive in the northern Plains. The creek — famously trout-clear, a favorite of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves crew, who filmed scenes here — runs alongside the road the entire way, sometimes right at the shoulder, sometimes dropping into pools deep enough to see fish holding still against the current. We pulled off constantly: at Bridal Veil Falls, a thin ribbon dropping straight off the canyon rim onto the roadside, and again at Spearfish Falls, reached by a short trail below the old Latchstring Inn, where the water crashes down in a wide green curtain.

Hiking Roughlock Falls and Little Spearfish Creek

A few miles up, we turned off onto the gravel road toward Roughlock Falls, where Little Spearfish Creek tumbles over a series of limestone steps in a setting so photogenic it shows up on half of South Dakota’s tourism brochures. The trail from the parking area is short and mostly boardwalk, easy enough that we shared it with families and retirees alike, but the falls themselves felt like a private discovery — mist drifting up into birch and spruce, a bench positioned exactly where you’d want to sit and do nothing for twenty minutes. Lia, predictably, wanted to keep going, so we pushed further along the creek trail until the crowds thinned to nothing.

Downtown and the D.C. Booth fish hatchery

Back in town, Spearfish’s small brick downtown has a genuine Old West bone structure beneath its coffee shops and breweries — Main Street still runs at a human scale, easy to walk end to end. We spent an hour at the D.C. Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery, an 1899 operation still raising trout, its ponds thick with fish that will practically eat from your hand, and its old hatchery buildings turned into a modest, oddly charming museum. In summer, the town runs an outdoor amphitheater show, and the whole place has the feel of a mountain community that knows exactly what it has and doesn’t feel the need to oversell it.

Getting There

Spearfish sits just off Interstate 90 in the northern Black Hills, about forty-five minutes from Rapid City Regional Airport, the nearest major air link. From Rapid City, it’s a straightforward hour’s drive west on I-90; from Deadwood and Lead, it’s a scenic twenty minutes further into the canyon. There’s no meaningful public transit here — this is car country, and a rental with good tires is really the only way to properly explore the byway and its trailheads.