If you are planning on visiting or passing through the Black Hills area of South Dakota with your family, a stop at Storybook Island Park is a must! This free public park transports you to a children’s wonderland full of characters and scenes from classic childhood stories and nursery rhymes.
How to Get to Storybook Island Park:
Storybook Island Park is located in Rapid City, South Dakota at 1301 Sheridan Lake Road. It is right off of US-16 and SD-44 right in Rapid City. When we went we were staying in Custer, South Dakota and it was just a one hour drive for us. It is very easy to find and seemed to have plenty of parking.
After you park you will walk in through some gates that take you on a path that circles to the actual Storybook Island Park. The park hours are 9:00 am to 7:00 pm daily. There is no entrance fee and you are not allowed to bring in any food or drink. They do sell concessions and have extra activities inside that cost $2 per ticket. The activities are the carousel, train, and a bounce house. There is also a small gift shop near the main entrance to the park.
What You Can Do at Storybook Island Park:
The best part about Storybook Island Park is just exploring the different areas and discovering the different stories and nursery rhymes. When we went we basically followed the paths throughout the park. When we found a character or an area that interested us or Lucy, we stopped and explored the house, went down the slide, got on the swings or took pictures with the character statues.
There isn’t one main play set like there usually is at a park. Instead there are lots of little spaces for different characters and scenes and most of those spaces has some kind of interaction for kids like a house to go in, a slide to go down, a swing to swing on, a character to see, etc. There is one area that is reserved for little kids that has a few more traditional park toys and play sets but they are designed for smaller children.
In addition to all of the free things to see, there is also a train that goes around one area of the park, a carousel and a bounce house that you can pay to go on. Each person requires a ticket which can be purchased near the attraction for $2 per ticket.
Sum Up:
We stopped to look at basically every spot in the park and took time to play in most of them. We were there for most of the morning. But it is easily a place that you can spend as much or as little time at as you want. There are lots of great spots for photos and it is just a really fun place to go visit. One of my favorite parts was guessing which characters or stories were being shown in each of the places. Storybook Island is definitely a great place for families and definitely worth a stop next time you’re in Rapid City, South Dakota!
