Medicine Rocks State Park

The towers at Medicine Rocks are sandstone, part of a rock layer laid down more than sixty million years ago by rivers washing sediment down from the young Rocky Mountains. Over the long ages since, that soft stone has been slowly eroded by wind and water, which is patient work that hollowed out the holes and arches and left the standing pillars behind. The result is a strange, sculpted look, almost like weathered Swiss cheese, with the tallest formations rising many dozens of feet from the prairie floor.

Because the stone is soft, it keeps changing. The same wind that shaped the rocks keeps reshaping them, wearing new hollows and softening old edges. It also means the rock holds a record: worn into the pillars are markings left over many generations, from ancient Native carvings to the names of cowboys and homesteaders. That history is exactly why visitors are now asked to look but never carve, so the story stays intact.

Long before it was a state park, Medicine Rocks was a place of meaning. The Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Crow peoples knew it as sacred country, a place of medicine, which in this sense means spiritual power rather than any cure. An old Native name for the rocks describes stone with a hole in it, a fitting description for these pillars. The rocks sat along a travel route between the Yellowstone Valley and the Black Hills, and their heights made good lookouts over the surrounding plains where great herds once grazed.

The place drew notice from newcomers too. In the 1880s a young Theodore Roosevelt, ranching and hunting in the Dakotas, rode through and was struck by the rocks, writing that they were as fantastically beautiful a place as he had ever seen. That mix of the sacred and the wondrous still hangs over the park, and it is part of what makes wandering among the pillars feel like more than sightseeing.

Medicine Rocks sits where open prairie meets scattered ponderosa pine, a mix that gives the park more variety of life than the bare grassland around it. Native grasses roll away in every direction, and clusters of pine give shade and shelter among and around the rocks. Together they support a good range of animals for such a quiet, remote spot.

Mule and white-tailed deer are common, and pronghorn range the flats nearby. Coyotes, bobcats, foxes, and porcupines move through, while overhead you may spot hawks, golden eagles, prairie falcons, and wild turkeys. In spring the grouse gather to display. It is the everyday wildlife of the northern plains, easy to overlook until you sit still among the rocks at dusk and let it come to you.

In 2020 Medicine Rocks was certified as a Dark Sky Sanctuary, one of the darkest and best-protected night skies on Earth. Stargazers rate darkness on a scale from one to nine, called the Bortle scale, where a bright city is a nine and the darkest wild places are a one. Medicine Rocks rates a one, the very best there is. With no city lights for miles in any direction, thousands of stars and the glowing Milky Way, the cloudy band of our own galaxy, pop out above the pale sandstone.

The park makes the most of it, hosting guided night hikes and group stargazing on summer evenings among the pillars. Nights are shortest in high summer, so many visitors set an alarm for around midnight to catch the fullest sky. In the cooler months the dark comes earlier and lasts far longer, and a night near the new moon, when the moon is dark, lets even the faintest stars shine through over the rocks.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.