At the bottom of his August 26 article on De Smet’s dogged private fundraising and community improvement, Bart Pfankuch mentions the Kingsbury County seat’s big vision for bicycle trails. De Smet booster Rita Anderson says De Smet isn’t just laying trail around town and maybe five miles south to Lake Thompson. Local boosters are hoping to make De Smet a hub in South Dakota’s first state-spanning bicycle trail:
Anderson said she and others are lobbying state lawmakers to offer a bill designating the entire area at the Laura Ingalls Wilder State Park. She is also pushing the concept of the Legendary Highway 14 Tower Trail project, which would create a bicycle trail following U.S. 14 on its entire east-west path across the state [Bart Pfankuch, “How Donors in De Smet Are Bringing Big Projects to Little Town on the Prairie,” South Dakota News Watch, 2026.08.26].
A U.S. 14 bike trail? Holy cow! I go Googling and find more detail from Jackie Hendry’s April 2025 article featuring Anderson and De Smet benefactor Nancy Montross:
“I think basically the people of De Smet realize that we need something like this because this is today’s world,” Nancy Montross said. “The biking, hiking trails, that’s the world we’re living in today. And if you take a look around our community or our area here, we just don’t have that. So that’s something we need to add so that we can keep our tourists right in town here for us.”
From there the vision grew to a biking trail all along Highway 14, which runs east and west across the entire state, predating Interstate 90. It began as part of the Black and Yellow trail, developed in the early 1900s and promoted as the shortest route from Chicago to Yellowstone National Park. The highway intersects with several South Dakota towns, from Brookings to Wall and beyond.
“That now is one of our long-term goals: that we would like to have this trail then extend all the way from Minnesota to the western border,” said Rita Anderson, former director of the De Smet Economic Development Corp. “There are not any other bike trails that cross the state. And so we feel Highway 14 is the very best route because it’s straight, it’s an original one, and there’s so many things along the way for tourists to see and for bikers” [Jackie Hendry, “De Smet Blazing a Trail Along Historic Highway 14,” SDPB, 2025.04.14].
De Smet is pushing “Tower” in its branding of the dream trail to include the observation tower it plans to build near its famed Silver Lake. The tower may not be what visitors expect: both the proposal that won the juried architectural contest and the design that De Smet community members voted for in a public meeting eschewed the typical vertical upcrops hearkening to grain elevators and lookout platforms and instead opted for snaking trails rising gradually to elevated horizontal paths closely paralleling the prairie that grounded young Laura Ingalls and defines De Smetians and most of the trail they would dream across the state.
Maybe De Smet just chose the Honorable Mention design over the juried contest winner because the first-place architect misspelled their town name, but I’ll argue that the locals felt the attraction of Scharen and McDaniel’s more graceful and delicate design. Both designs boldly defy vertical assumptions, and Scheuermann’s design literally digs deeper to integrate the earth and grass into the tower path, but Scharen and McDaniel give visitors a more open, airy design, inviting the prairie light and wind right down to visitors’ feet.
But imagine having this De Smet tower/walkway as just one stop on a 440-mile east-west bicycle adventure across South Dakota! At a pace of 60–70 miles a day, I can imagine first day from the Minnesota border near Elkton to De Smet (they came up with the idea, so they deserve my camping dollar!), then subsequent camps in Miller, Pierre, Midland, Wall, and Rapid City, where I would have to decide (as would trail planners!) whether I wanted to take the easy route along US 14/I-90 around the northeast hogback/racetrack of the Black Hills or the more pedal-challenging but visually and muscularly more rewarding detour to Deadwood and Spearfish Canyon on US 14A. That one-week tour wouldn’t just be a six days of hard slog with the Black Hills as the big sabbath-payoff; the US 14 route De Smet suggests includes a splendid panoply of tour-worthy South Dakota sites: great leafy Brookings and SDSU, the glacial lakes, the tower and all the other cool stuff De Smet is building, the rise out of the Jim River Valley up to Ree Heights, the Missouri River Valley and the Capitol, the terrifying (for a rider alone on two wheels) climb to the high lonesome and the Bad River, the mad kitsch of Wall, the Cheyenne River bluffs, and then after all that the adventure of the Black Hills. A US 14 bicycle trail would be a complete South Dakota tourism brochure, the whole darn state written along one long, quiet line seen and breathed one pedal crank after another.
A note to trail dreamers: like healthy farms, healthy bicycle trails have lots of trees. A good shelterbelt, just a couple rows of trees on each side of the pedaling right of way, can make riding in rain, wind, and sun much more tolerable. Whatever easements and pavements are required to add a safe bicycle trail along Highway 14, make sure you include proposals for some long stands of trees along the way!