Bureau of Land Management · South Dakota Field Office · SD
Alkali Creek Horsecamp
The agency doesn’t say how you get a siteIts record carries no access type, so treat it as a place to phone before you drive.
- Right now
- Nobody has saidNo season, no closure, no bookings to read
3,530 ftElevation
16 ftWater · Alkali Creek
1.6 miSE of Sturgis, SD
28%Tree cover
Bortle 4Night sky · 50th darkest of 52 in SD
The place
Around the campground
- Fall color · reported 4 days ago, 34 km away
- Patchy color
Source: More Than Just Parks foliage tracker, joined to this campground by distance (34 km) · Oct 13, 2026
Phone before you drive
recreation.gov publishes no availability for a campground you can’t reserve, so there’s no thirty-night reading to draw here. The season bar above is what the agency does publish.
Booking window6 months outBooking opens 6 months ahead; today unlocks arrivals through April 17, 2027. The agency publishes no reservable season in the record we hold, so the window may close earlier than that.recreation.gov
Runs itBureau of Land Managementthe agency’s record
Every line of the receipt · 3
What you actually pay
The sign priceBureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management publishes no per-night rate for this campground that we can read, so there’s no sign price to print. That’s a gap in the record, not a free campground.
The booking feerecreation.gov
We hold no recreation.gov booking record for this campground, so we can’t say whether a booking fee applies.
What a stay costs
The agency publishes no nightly rate for this campground, so there’s no total to show.
How we know this receipt · 4
Booking fee, change fee, cancellation fee, no-show: Rules and Reservation Policies, Recreation.gov, the published fee schedule, curated by hand into lib/reservation-fee-schedule.json (9 rows, each carrying its own verbatim sentence). The publisher states these policies were last updated September 2019. · Sep 9, 2026
The two totals: Derived by CAMPANAC by adding the agency’s own published nightly rate to recreation.gov’s own published reservation fee. Both components are cited above; the addition is ours and is shown only where every component is known. · Sep 9, 2026
Who keeps the booking fee: Recreation.gov facility policy text, Dead Swede Campground (facility 234221) · Not on the national policy page. This is agency policy text recreation.gov publishes on individual campground pages; this site holds it verbatim on 45 active campgrounds (campground_rules.cancellation_description, scripts/load-facility-rules.mjs). · Sep 9, 2026
The contract: Reservation Gods: Who Stole Our Campsites and Sold Them Back to Us, More Than Just Parks, April 2025 · Apr 1, 2025
Source: BLM National Recreation Sites · Aug 24, 2026
record Aug 24, 2026 · How we know all this
Getting there
the map and the coordinate
Where it is
Also near hereAlkali Creek CampgroundSouth Dakota Field Office · 0.2 mi
Dalton Lake CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 10 mi
Boxelder Forks CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 13 mi
Roubaix LakeBlack Hills National Forest · 16 mi
Hanna CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 20 mi
Pactola Reservoir CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 21 mi
Dalton Lake CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 10 miBoxelder Forks CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 13 miRoubaix LakeBlack Hills National Forest · 16 miHanna CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 20 miPactola Reservoir CampgroundBlack Hills National Forest · 21 miSource: BLM National Recreation Sites · Aug 24, 2026
The weather
the thirty-year normal
Next four days, and the thirty-year normal
Typical weather
Typical October night 36°F, day 61°F.
Coldest month of the year: typical January night 15°F, below freezing. Bring a bag rated colder than that, and expect ice in the water bottle.
100°32°10°
Daily high and lowDays with 0.10 in or more
A normal is the 1991-2020 average for the month, not a forecast: about half of all Julys are colder than the July line. The seven-day forecast above answers the other question.
Measured at: FT MEADE, SD (USC00393069), 2 miles away and 222 ft lower
The land, and who answers for it
what threatens it · who answers for it
Roadless country, and what’s coming for it
Roadless
You’re camping on ground somebody wants. We track the threats and the comment deadlines.
Source: USFS Inventoried Roadless Areas via MTJP Roadless Map · Jul 29, 2026
Who answers for this land
Alkali Creek Horsecamp is in South Dakota’s at-large congressional district. Its representative, Dusty Johnson (R), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: F. See every public-lands vote →
How we know
every fact on this page, and where it came from
Right now: Bureau of Land Management publishes no season and no closure for this campground, and it takes no bookings we can read. That’s a gap in the record and not a locked gate.
Elevation: USGS 3DEP elevation point query at this campground’s coordinate · Sep 7, 2026
Tree cover: NLCD Tree Canopy Cover 2024 (USDA Forest Service / MRLC), one 30 m cell at this coordinate · Sep 9, 2026
Fall color: More Than Just Parks foliage tracker, joined to this campground by distance (34 km) · Oct 13, 2026
Reported by: USA National Phenology Network (Nature's Notebook), reported patchy color · Oct 13, 2026
Cell signal: the BLM’s own campground description, read as text by CAMPANAC. None of this is a measurement. It’s what the land manager published about the place, and phones, carriers and weather all disagree with each other; treat it as a warning, not a promise.
Nearest place of any size: Blucksberg Mountain, SD, 0.7 mi NNW (a census designated place). Straight line.