The Needles Highway: A Road That Refused to Be Practical
Near Custer, South Dakota
One of the most dramatic drives in the American West follows a road that was built to be beautiful rather than practical. The Needles Highway, now South Dakota Highway Eighty-Seven, threads through some of the most spectacular granite formations in the Black Hills, climbing through forests, bending around boulders, and then squeezing through gaps in solid rock that look, at first glance, too narrow for a car. It was finished in nineteen twenty-two under the personal direction of Peter Norbeck, who surveyed the terrain himself on foot and horseback because he did not want a practical road.
He wanted a beautiful one. The highway's most famous feature is a narrow gap in a granite spire called the Needles Eye, a slot in the rock just wide enough for a single vehicle with inches to spare on each side. Norbeck insisted on the route, and the workers blasted a narrow passage through the granite.
The Needles Eye and the other rock tunnels along the route were carved through the granite rather than around it, because going around would have ruined the view. Today the highway is fourteen miles long and is one of the most photographed roads in the country. It is a reminder that road building was once, in the right hands, an art form.
