The Trout Waters of the Black Hills: A Sacred Prairie at the Heart of Everything

This article was originally titled "The Black Hills" in the Feb-Mar 2026 issue of Fly Fisherman magazine.

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Dust billows behind us as Catherine Smith and I speed along the freshly graded gravel road, winding deeper into a narrow valley crowded with tall ponderosa pines. After miles of seemingly endless forest, we crest a rise and suddenly find ourselves crossing an open prairie, strangely devoid of the dense pines that, from a distance, give these hills their characteristic dark color and their Lakota name, Pahá Sápa: The Black Hills.

This large, treeless expanse lies at the geographic center of the Black Hills, 4,000 acres of prairie so distinct from the surrounding wooded landscape that it can easily be seen on a satellite image—the bullseye in this target-shaped mountain range.

We pull off at an unmarked cattle gate. Dust from the road swirls around us as we untwist the baling wire that secures the gate. Low clouds scud overhead, pushed by an incessant prairie wind. The broken sky only deepens the color of the distant and brooding limestone crags of Castle Rock and Flag Mountain. We’ve come to this desolate place to visit a tiny body of trout water, a seemingly insignificant impoundment on a nameless tributary of Castle Creek, in the center of this broad prairie. But the only thing insignificant about this vast, treeless prairie is the tiny pond.

To the first European visitors, the surrounding crenelated limestone outcroppings vaguely resembled castles, and they gave the valley and the creek its current name, Castle Creek. But this prairie has another name, a sacred name given by the Indigenous people long before George Armstrong Custer led an expeditionary force of more than a thousand men into this valley in July 1874. The Lakota called this sacred oasis of grassland, this bare place Pe’ Sla, “the heart of everything that is.”

The Black Hills rise from the South Dakota plains like an apparition, a dark saw-toothed silhouette above the tan grasslands and ashen, otherworldly Badlands. Stretching roughly 100 miles from north to south, and 40 miles across, they rise to a rocky height of more than 7,200 feet. Geologically distinct from the Rocky Mountains—or even any of the closer ranges—the Black Hills stand apart, an island in the plains.

And within this high, rugged island of granite spires, slate cliffs, and limestone buttes are more than 800 miles of streams and 38 reservoirs teeming with trout. But that wasn’t always the case. While Custer’s scouts combed the Black Hills for gold that summer of 1874, the expedition’s chief engineer, William H. Ludlow, was keen to find different treasure.

“We were continually looking for trout in the streams,” Ludlow wrote in his 1875 report on the expedition, “which seemed as though made expressly for that fish.” But to his surprise, not a single trout was found. Undaunted, he concluded: “There could be no finer trout-streams in the world than these, were they once stocked.” His conclusion proved prophetic. The first trout were stocked in Cleghorn Springs in 1886, only a dozen years after Custer’s expedition, and by 1910 more than 15 million trout and char had been stocked in South Dakota’s streams and rivers. Today, the Black Hills attract trout anglers from around the world who are drawn by the unrivaled scenery, the layers of fraught history, the faces carved on Mount Rushmore, and, of course, the outstanding fishing.

The Black Hills are roughly divided into three regions: the Southern, Central, and Northern Hills. Each of these is distinguished by its particular geologic characteristics, which translate to the type of fishing you’ll find there. And although you can drive from one end of the Black Hills to the other in less than three hours (barring any “bison jams” or road construction projects), the changing landscape can make it feel like you’ve covered a much greater distance. A fishing buddy of mine once described the Black Hills as a “miniature Mountain West,” and he had a point. The three regions of the Hills offer many of the best elements of the streams of the Front Range of the Rockies, without the hours of windshield time between fishing spots.

The Southern Hills, which the U.S. Forest Service calls the Hell Canyon District, stretch from the Cheyenne River, south of the city of Hot Springs, to Spring Creek, which flows west to east, north of the town of Custer. Within the Southern Hills lie many of the most iconic and familiar landmarks of the Black Hills: Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Black Elk Peak (formerly Harney Peak), the soaring granite spires and narrow tunnels of the Needles Highway, and the dusty buffalo herds of Custer State Park.

Here too are a handful of excellent small streams, such as French Creek, where Custer’s scouts claimed to have first found gold, and Grace Coolidge Creek, named for the former First Lady, whose notoriously taciturn husband turned the State Game Lodge into the Summer White House in 1927. There are also several trout lakes in the Southern Hills, including the beautiful and often-photographed Sylvan Lake, fringed with dramatic granite spires at the base of Black Elk Peak.  

Stretching north from Hill City to the historic mining town of Rochford, and west from Rapid City—the largest city in the Hills and the second most populous city in South Dakota, after Sioux Falls—to a few miles west of Deerfield Reservoir, the Central Hills (or Mystic Forestry District), include both the largest reservoir in the Hills—Pactola Reservoir—and the largest trout stream, Rapid Creek. But deep in the Central Hills, down winding two-track Forest Service roads, are many smaller creeks and man-made lakes set in some of the most dramatic vertical landscapes you’ll find in the Hills. Among these smaller gems are Castle Creek, Spring Creek, Boxelder Creek, Slate Creek, and the tiny Reynolds Prairie Pond in the heart of the Pe’ Sla.

The Northern Hills cover an area from Rochford and the South Fork of Rapid Creek north to the ranching town of Belle Fourche and west to the Bear Lodge Mountains in Wyoming. Within this area lie Spearfish Creek, which flows north down a dramatic canyon and into the city of Spearfish, and its tributaries Hanna Creek (East Spearfish Creek) and Little Spearfish Creek, as well as Iron Creek, and Sand Creek, just across the border in Wyoming.

On a warm June morning four months earlier, I had caught up with Pete Nielson, owner of Finn Provisions Fly Shop on Main Street in historic Spearfish, and his client, Chad Erickson, on a beautiful section of Spearfish Creek. Pete has spent the last two decades guiding and fishing the Northern Hills. He’s quiet and thoughtful, watchful and patient. Wadered up and armed with 4- and 5-weight rods, the three of us walked along the shoulder of the winding canyon road to a nondescript spot along the creek, far enough from the parking lot to throw the bloodhounds off our trail, so to speak. Here, the towering walls of Spearfish Canyon narrowed the blue sky and cast shadows on the swift, clear, boulder-strewn creek. I paused to take in the dramatic landscape. Pete followed my gaze to a high ridge. “Strong medicine,” he said quietly.

We billy-goated down the steep bank to an emerald pool at the base of a rocky run. A pack of motorcycles wound loudly up the canyon, a harbinger of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally a few weeks away. Pete rigged a two-fly Euro-nymph setup for Chad, with a jigged Pheasant Tail natural at anchor, and an unweighted Skinny Nelson at tag. “Less is more,” said Pete. “I like the simple patterns. We make it harder than it is so many times.”

Then, after a pause, he says, “Different creeks, different profiles. On my creek, they like it skinny.” The steep bank and overhanging willows threatened to reach out and snag Chad’s casts, but with encouragement and a bit of gentle guidance from Pete, Chad hooked a chunky rainbow on his fourth cast—the first of many that morning. And that morning, under his watchful eye, it really did feel like it was Pete’s creek.

Spearfish Creek wasn’t always this clear. Gold-mining operations using cyanide began in the late 1890s, just as construction of the Spearfish National Fish Hatchery, under the supervision of manager D.C. Booth, was being completed. But any hopes that mining and fishing could coexist in the canyon were dashed in 1901, when mining operators were accused of killing trout by dumping cyanide directly into the stream. In addition to the cyanide, the fine sands and slimes created through the cyanide process choked the stream and suffocated the trout.

A battle raged between the forces of mining and fishing until about 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War coincided with a shift away from the use of the cyanide process. But the competition for control of water resources by mining operations in the Black Hills would continue for decades to come. Gold is still mined in the Hills, though the massive Homestake Mine—once the largest, deepest, and most productive gold mine in North America, at a staggering 8,000 feet deep—closed in 2002, shifting from gold mining to a site for scientific research.  

The National Fish Hatchery at Spearfish closed in 1983, but reopened as the D.C. Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery six years later, and continues to be a popular tourist attraction in Spearfish.  

Since 1981, a small but dedicated volunteer organization of trout anglers called the Black Hills Flyfishers (BHFF) has partnered with South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks (SDGFP), the U.S. Forest Service, and other agencies and businesses—including Homestake—to protect and improve Black Hills stream habitat and implement catch-and-release regulations on critical sections of Spearfish Creek, Rapid Creek, and other streams. The BHFF draws volunteers and financial contributions from individuals and businesses across the country, and works to ensure the proper stewardship of the streams and trout of the Black Hills.

Though the trout we catch here—browns, brookies, rainbows, splake, and tiger trout—are not native to the Hills, the foods they eat are. The Black Hills streams are home to many of the aquatic insects and hatches familiar to fly anglers from across the northern tier of the U.S. and southern Canada, including Baetis, caddis, stoneflies, scuds, and terrestrials. Pete Nielson recommended I pick up an assortment of Eastern and Western patterns, including tried-and-tested classics such as Pheasant Tails, Elk-hair Caddis, Hare’s-ears, and Parachute Adams, along with his secret weapons, such as Barr’s Tung Teaser, the Skinny Nelson, Rainbow Scud, and even an unlikely Alaskan streamer pattern, the Dolly Llama. But since he’s sworn me to secrecy, don’t tell anyone where you got this list.

Back on the prairie pond, however, the fly patterns remain in the box. No rises dimple the rippled silver surface, and the wind works against us, yet we’re happy. Catherine and I have been fishing the Black Hills together for 20 years. But her love for the Hills goes back to her South Dakota childhood, and mine goes back almost five decades to fishing trips with my late father. It’s difficult to name a creek we haven’t fished individually or together, nor a Forest Service road we haven’t followed.

Twenty years ago, those roads were silent two-track trails through the pines; today, they’re dusty thoroughfares crowded with convoys of side-by-sides that whine into the backcountry. One local fly angler who’s worked for the Forest Service for over 40 years told me she’d stopped fishing her favorite little trout creek because of the noisy traffic. With all the motorcycles, snowmobiles, and side-by-sides out here, sometimes it seems like having fun in the Hills requires making a certain amount of noise. But these popular machines have brought a lot of much-needed year-round revenue into the local economy, and made exploring the expansive Black Hills National Forest more accessible for folks who might not otherwise get into the beautiful backcountry.

And the truth is there are still plenty of places to fish in quiet solitude in the Hills, places like Grace Coolidge Creek in Custer State Park, or the upper reaches of Spring Creek in the Central Hills, or even Rapid Creek at the former mining settlement of Placerville.  

But on this particular day, the remote and windswept prairie pond proves unproductive, fringed in mud and weeds, and nearly dried up from the late-summer drought. We linger for a moment to listen to the voice of the wind, and then trudge wordlessly back to the truck. In private hands for almost 140 years and known as Reynolds Prairie, the Pe’ Sla now belongs to the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires that make up the Great Sioux Nation. It is one of the five sacred places of the Lakota, and the place where they track the path of the sun through the heavens. There is something eerily mystical about this sacred prairie, and as we secure the gate behind us, I can’t shake the feeling that this place, these hills, really are the heart of everything that is.

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John van Vliet is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Art of Fly Tying and Trout Fishing in Southeast Minnesota. He’s a writer, filmmaker, and sailor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Big River Magazine, and many other publications. His latest book is Trout Fishing in Northeast Iowa (2022). The spring creeks of the Driftless Area are his home waters. Troutrunpress.com, Instagram: @John_van_vliet

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