Beware of travel to the Badlands in May

[Isaac-1]

We just returned from a trip to the badlands of Souths Dakota, black hills, etc. and even though the weather was overall nice, we found that MANY secondary tourist attractions, as well as many of the local RV parks do not open until the Memorial day. We were still able to see all the major attractions but it did miss out on a few minor ones, and found about half the RV parks going across on I-90 had either just opened for the season or were about to open for Memorial day. In addition be aware the region gets about 80% of its annual rainfall in May-June.

[Skip426]

Majority of parks will also close right after Labor Day too; the few that do stay open past Labor Day are closed by Oct. first.

[Backcountry1]

While May/June they might get more rain, July/August is more of the intense pop up thunderstorms that love to produce nice size hail.

One year I was disperse camping near Roubaix Lake, and a quick pop up storm came through. Golf ball hail.

But yes many of the smaller mom and pop shops and stores around the area are open only Memorial Day - Labor Day.

[Isaac-1]

The thing that surprised me was it is not just the stores, it is also museums and other tourist attractions. I can understand it if the weather was still cold, but when we got there in mid May the daytime highs were mostly in the 70's and 80's, and there were certainly tourist, even if everywhere was not crowded yet (the parking structure at Mount Rushmore for example was perhaps 30% full on the day we were there while there was misting rain), much the same can be said for number of tourist parked at the scenic overlooks at the Badlands NP, though parking around Wall Drugs was probably closer to the 10-20% capacity, ie street front parking out front was mostly full, but few people were parked in the overflow lots a block or so away.