50 Fun Facts About Wind Cave National Park

Wind Cave National Park is in which U.S. state?

South Dakota. The cave lies beneath the southern Black Hills, and in Lakota tradition its small natural opening is where the first people emerged onto the earth.

Which president signed the 1903 law that made Wind Cave a national park?

Theodore Roosevelt. He signed after years of lawsuits between a mining company and a homesteading family ended with Washington ruling that neither of them owned the cave.

Which lawman, remembered as Deadwood's first sheriff, took charge of Wind Cave for the government in 1902?

Seth Bullock. He appointed the guides, let them charge fifty cents a visitor, and banned night trips and vandalism months before the cave became a park.

Wind Cave holds more boxwork than all other known caves combined; what does that formation resemble?

A honeycomb. Its thin blades are mineral veins that once filled cracks; the softer rock between them dissolved away and left them standing out as thin-walled boxes.

Wind Cave's boxwork is made of thin, crossing blades of which mineral?

Calcite. It took the place of gypsum that had squeezed into cracks in the limestone, so the blades keep the shape of fractures the older mineral forced open.

Why is Wind Cave said to 'breathe'?

Air flows in and out as outside pressure changes. Researchers use the strength of that wind to gauge the cave's volume, and reckon only a small fraction of it has been found.

Which brothers are credited with finding Wind Cave in 1881, when wind from a small hole blew off a hat?

Tom and Jesse Bingham. The story goes that when friends were brought back to see the trick, the wind had reversed and sucked the hat down into the hole instead.

Which teenage guide explored about eight to ten miles of Wind Cave in the early 1890s and kept a diary of it?

Alvin McDonald. He signed the cave walls 'ZUQ', his initials run through an old Civil War cipher, and wrote in his journal that he had given up finding the end of the cave.

How did Wind Cave's young chief guide find his way back out of its unmapped passages?

He unrolled string behind him. The first people known to enter, in 1881, had done the same, and a party that autumn followed their string deep into the cave.

What killed Wind Cave's 20-year-old chief guide in December 1893?

Typhoid fever. He is thought to have caught it in Chicago while showing cave specimens at the 1893 World's Fair, and he was buried on the hill above the natural entrance.

How did 1890s visitors enter Wind Cave?

Through a cabin trap door. When the cave's wind blew hard it took two people to move the door, and below it visitors climbed down wooden steps and ladders.

Whom did Wind Cave's owners bring in for an 1893 publicity stunt, to find a pin hidden deep in the cave?

A mind reader. 'Professor' Paul Johnstone went in blindfolded with a newspaperman in tow, and after three days of searching and headlines the pin was found.

In the Lakota emergence story told at Wind Cave, which trickster spirit schemed to lure people up to the surface?

Iktomi. In the version the park tells, the spider trickster sent a wolf down with meat and fine clothes, and those who followed it out too soon were turned into the first bison.

What do explorers find at the lowest known level of Wind Cave, about 500 feet below the surface?

Underground lakes. They are where the cave dips into the water table, a window on the aquifer that supplies the region, and scientists study microbes living in their clear water.

Whose 1874 army expedition reported gold in the Black Hills, drawing miners onto Lakota treaty land?

Custer's. His column of more than a thousand men found gold along French Creek, and within two years prospectors had poured into hills that an 1868 treaty had set aside for the Lakota.

Wind Cave is among the ten longest caves known; which American cave system tops that list?

Mammoth Cave. Kentucky's giant has more than 400 miles mapped, while Wind Cave, once ranked fourth, had slipped to about sixth by 2025 as flooded caves in Mexico were surveyed.

Which longer cave, in the same county as Wind Cave, has never been found to connect to it?

Jewel Cave. Long taken for a small cave, it now has more than 220 miles mapped, and the wind at its entrance suggests that only a few percent of it has been found.

All of Wind Cave's mapped passages, well over 100 miles of them, lie beneath roughly how much land?

About 1 square mile. Its passages are stacked in several levels and tangled into a maze, making it one of the most complex cave systems in the world.

Which limestone, named with the Lakota words for the Black Hills, holds Wind Cave's passages?

Pahasapa. From a distance the pine-covered slopes look dark against the pale grassland, which is how the hills, and later the limestone beneath them, came by the name.

Wind Cave's limestone began forming about 350 million years ago from what?

Shells on a shallow sea floor. The same warm sea left pockets of gypsum as it evaporated, and those pockets later set off the chemistry that hollowed out the cave.

Wind Cave has few stalactites; which two formations join the boxwork on its walls instead?

Frostwork and cave popcorn. Water here is thought to seep evenly through the rock instead of dripping from cracks, so it leaves needles and knobs of mineral rather than stalactites.

Above its cave, Wind Cave National Park protects one of the country's last intact stretches of which habitat?

Natural mixed-grass prairie. It lies where the tall grasses of the east meet the short grasses of the west, so plants and animals from both halves of the continent overlap here.

Most North American bison carry genes from which other animal, a legacy Wind Cave's herd was long thought to have escaped?

Domestic cattle. Ranchers crossbred the two in the late 1800s; tests in 2004 found no trace in Wind Cave's herd, but whole-genome work in 2022 detected a little in every bison sampled.

Wind Cave's bison herd was founded with 14 animals sent west from which zoo?

The Bronx Zoo (New York Zoological Society). Its director led the American Bison Society, which bred the animals in the city and sent them out to restock the plains.

Which prairie animal was reintroduced to Wind Cave in 1914, a year after its first bison arrived?

Pronghorn. A game preserve set up on the park's grassland in 1912 brought them back, shipped in from Alberta, to country that had lost its big grazing herds.

Which endangered mustelid, once declared extinct, was returned to Wind Cave's grassland in 2007?

Black-footed ferret. Written off as extinct in 1979, it was rediscovered in Wyoming two years later, and captive breeding from those survivors made the releases possible.

The rare predator returned to Wind Cave in 2007 lives almost entirely on which prey?

Prairie dogs. They make up as much as 90 percent of its diet, and the hunter also moves into its victims' burrows to sleep and raise its young.

Fossils of which animal, about 30 million years old, were unearthed in Wind Cave National Park in 2003?

A rhinoceros. The early rhino Subhyracodon turned up a hundred years after the park was created, so the dig was named the Centennial Site; a horse the size of a greyhound lay nearby.

Which caving couple, better known for mapping a neighbouring cave, led Wind Cave's breakthroughs in the 1960s?

Jan and Herb Conn. In 1963 the two rock climbers made the first breakaway from the known cave since the 1890s, pushing west into miles of virgin passage and the huge Club Room.

Which town just south of Wind Cave National Park is home to a sinkhole dig full of Ice Age bones?

Hot Springs. Its Mammoth Site came to light in 1974, when a machine levelling ground for new houses struck a tusk; more than 60 mammoths have since been found in the old sinkhole.

Which Wind Cave room, discovered in 1892, remained its largest known chamber until the 1960s?

The Fairgrounds. Four of the cave's first guides broke into it one March day, and a government surveyor in 1902 called it the largest unsupported room he had ever seen below ground.

Which famed orator, three times his party's presidential nominee, toured Wind Cave in the 1890s as its owners courted publicity?

William Jennings Bryan. The owners invited famous guests and advertised each visit in the newspapers, and Bryan obliged by declaring himself enthusiastic over the cave's beauty.

Elizabeth Warren attacked a rival's 'wine cave' fundraiser in a 2019 debate; which senator then joked she had only seen Wind Cave?

Amy Klobuchar. 'I have never even been to a wine cave,' she said, recommending the real one to Pete Buttigieg, and the state's congressman quickly used the line to promote tourism.

The Centennial Trail starts in Wind Cave National Park and runs north through the Black Hills to which sacred peak?

Bear Butte. The trail opened in 1989 to mark a hundred years of statehood, and it ends on a summit where Plains nations still leave prayer cloths and tobacco offerings.

Which 1868 agreement, later violated by gold miners, redefined the Lakota lands in the Black Hills?

Treaty of Fort Laramie. It set the Black Hills aside for the Sioux alone, yet once gold was found the government took the hills back in 1877.

Which nation, allied with the Lakota at the Little Bighorn, also camped around Wind Cave long before settlers found it?

Cheyenne. Tipi rings near the natural entrance show that people camped beside the cave, yet there is no evidence that anyone went inside before 1881.

Which cave formation, tiny twisted branching growths, was also first discovered in Wind Cave?

Mineral pseudomorphs are common too, relics of the acid that helped carve the cave.

Which acid, released as gypsum in Wind Cave's limestone turned to another mineral, ate away the rock around the boxwork?

Sulfuric acid. Gypsum is a sulfate, so when it was converted the freed sulfur made an acid that crumbled the surrounding limestone and left the tougher crack fillings standing.

What did Wind Cave's early owners sell to tourists, souvenirs that would be illegal to take today?

Cave crystals. Katie Stabler, the cave's first woman guide, ran a shop in town selling pieces broken from its walls, and a 1902 government surveyor noted the scars left along the routes.

Why was a revolving door fitted to Wind Cave's walk-in entrance in 1992?

To act as an airlock. The man-made entrance had been letting the outside atmosphere pour into the cave and change the climate of the passages beyond it.

What do Wind Cave's rangers deliberately use to stop pine forest from swallowing the park's grassland?

Prescribed fires. Grass keeps most of itself below ground and grows back after a burn, while young pines do not, and decades of putting fires out had let the forest thicken.

After a Wind Cave tour, how do visitors usually return more than 200 feet to the surface?

By elevator. Young men from a 1930s work-relief camp helped sink the shaft, and until it opened in 1935 every visitor had to climb back out the way they came in.

What is the name of Wind Cave National Park's campground, set among ponderosa pines?

Elk Mountain. Elk were brought back to the park from Wyoming in the 1910s, and each September rangers lead campers out from here to listen for the bulls bugling.

What stands on Rankin Ridge, the highest point in Wind Cave National Park?

A fire lookout tower. It began in 1952 as a crow's nest on a cedar pole and was rebuilt in steel, but nobody has staffed it since 1998 and hikers now come for the view.

Which fake 'discovery' did Wind Cave's promoters put on show inside the cave in the 1890s?

A petrified man. The owners said he had been found close by, charged visitors a small sum to look at him, and later sold him to a buyer in Kansas.

In 1980 the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux over $100 million for the taking of the Black Hills; what did they do?

Refused the money. They want the land itself returned, so the award has sat untouched and has grown with interest to well over a billion dollars.

Which New Deal agency ran a camp at Wind Cave in the 1930s, building its stairways, trails and walk-in entrance?

Civilian Conservation Corps. Its recruits earned about a dollar a day, most of it sent home to their families, and the camp's baseball team twice won the state CCC title.

Geologists think the oldest passages of Wind Cave began forming roughly how long ago?

About 300 million years ago. That makes it one of the oldest caves known: its first passages were dissolved soon after the sea that laid down its limestone drained away.

What did visiting geologists of the 1890s believe had hollowed out Wind Cave?

An extinct geyser. Luella Owen argued it after an 1896 visit and an early guide recalled other geologists agreeing, but the cave was in fact dissolved by slow-moving groundwater.

How were the early guided tours of Wind Cave lit?

By candlelight. Each visitor was handed a candle at the entrance, electric lights did not arrive until 1931, and the park still runs a Candlelight Tour through an unlit section.