Cross-Country Skiing in South Dakota: Where the Trails Are

2 trail systems in South Dakota say on their own pages that a machine goes on the trail, and the ones that publish a figure add up to 23 km. Big Hill Ski Area, run by Black Hills National Forest, is the largest of them at 10 miles (16.1 km).

South Dakota runs no single statewide ski pass. 0 of the 2 systems here charge for one, each on its own terms, and the rest ask nothing at the trailhead.

There is no single conditions report for South Dakota. 0 of the 2 systems publish a grooming report of their own, and those are linked beside each one below. The clubs and the nordic centers update theirs the most often, because skiing is the whole of what they do.

Neither the Forest nor the two ski clubs that do the grooming prints a start or end date; the trails are cut when the winter snow is on them and the Forest gives a ranger district phone number rather than a calendar.. That is Black Hills National Forest’s own framing. Grooming is set by snow depth rather than by a date, so a system can sit idle inside its own season and run past the end of it in a good year.

A groomed trail has had a machine over it: the snow is compacted and, on most nordic trail, a pair of parallel tracks is cut into it for classic skis, with a flat lane beside them for skating. An ungroomed trail is whatever the last skier and the last storm left. Both are worth skiing and they take different skis, which is why these pages say which of the two a manager is claiming rather than counting every ski trail as the same thing.