Wind Cave National Park Trivia
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50 free Wind Cave National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Wind Cave National Park trivia quiz covers the South Dakota park that in 1903 became the first cave anywhere in the world protected as a national park. It ranges across the cave itself, one of the longest and densest on Earth with 95 percent of the world's known boxwork, the 'breathing' that gave it its name, and the mixed-grass prairie above it where bison, elk, pronghorn and black-footed ferrets roam. There is plenty of history too: the Lakota emergence story of Tokahe and the sacred hole that blew air, the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty and Custer's gold survey, the Bingham brothers and the hat blown off Tom's head in 1881, teenager Alvin McDonald mapping ten miles by candlelight, dollar tours by candle, Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 park act, the bison brought from the Bronx Zoo and Yellowstone, and even a 2019 presidential-debate cameo. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a Black Hills road-trip game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Badlands, Mount Rushmore and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wind Cave National Park is in which U.S. state?
South Dakota
South Dakota. The cave lies beneath the southern Black Hills, and in Lakota tradition its small natural opening is where the first people emerged onto the earth.
Q 02Which president signed the 1903 law that made Wind Cave a national park?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. He signed after years of lawsuits between a mining company and a homesteading family ended with Washington ruling that neither of them owned the cave.
Q 03Which lawman, remembered as Deadwood's first sheriff, took charge of Wind Cave for the government in 1902?
Seth Bullock
Seth Bullock. He appointed the guides, let them charge fifty cents a visitor, and banned night trips and vandalism months before the cave became a park.
Q 04Wind Cave holds more boxwork than all other known caves combined; what does that formation resemble?
A honeycomb
A honeycomb. Its thin blades are mineral veins that once filled cracks; the softer rock between them dissolved away and left them standing out as thin-walled boxes.
Q 05Wind Cave's boxwork is made of thin, crossing blades of which mineral?
Calcite
Calcite. It took the place of gypsum that had squeezed into cracks in the limestone, so the blades keep the shape of fractures the older mineral forced open.
Q 06Why is Wind Cave said to 'breathe'?
Air flows in and out as outside pressure changes
Air flows in and out as outside pressure changes. Researchers use the strength of that wind to gauge the cave's volume, and reckon only a small fraction of it has been found.
Q 07Which brothers are credited with finding Wind Cave in 1881, when wind from a small hole blew off a hat?
Tom and Jesse Bingham
Tom and Jesse Bingham. The story goes that when friends were brought back to see the trick, the wind had reversed and sucked the hat down into the hole instead.
Q 08Which teenage guide explored about eight to ten miles of Wind Cave in the early 1890s and kept a diary of it?
Alvin McDonald
Alvin McDonald. He signed the cave walls 'ZUQ', his initials run through an old Civil War cipher, and wrote in his journal that he had given up finding the end of the cave.
Q 09How did Wind Cave's young chief guide find his way back out of its unmapped passages?
He unrolled string behind him
He unrolled string behind him. The first people known to enter, in 1881, had done the same, and a party that autumn followed their string deep into the cave.
Q 10What killed Wind Cave's 20-year-old chief guide in December 1893?
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever. He is thought to have caught it in Chicago while showing cave specimens at the 1893 World's Fair, and he was buried on the hill above the natural entrance.
Q 11How did 1890s visitors enter Wind Cave?
Through a cabin trap door
Through a cabin trap door. When the cave's wind blew hard it took two people to move the door, and below it visitors climbed down wooden steps and ladders.
Q 12Whom did Wind Cave's owners bring in for an 1893 publicity stunt, to find a pin hidden deep in the cave?
A mind reader
A mind reader. 'Professor' Paul Johnstone went in blindfolded with a newspaperman in tow, and after three days of searching and headlines the pin was found.
Q 13In the Lakota emergence story told at Wind Cave, which trickster spirit schemed to lure people up to the surface?
Iktomi
Q 21Wind Cave has few stalactites; which two formations join the boxwork on its walls instead?
Frostwork and cave popcorn
Frostwork and cave popcorn. Water here is thought to seep evenly through the rock instead of dripping from cracks, so it leaves needles and knobs of mineral rather than stalactites.
Q 22Above its cave, Wind Cave National Park protects one of the country's last intact stretches of which habitat?
Natural mixed-grass prairie
Natural mixed-grass prairie. It lies where the tall grasses of the east meet the short grasses of the west, so plants and animals from both halves of the continent overlap here.
Q 23Most North American bison carry genes from which other animal, a legacy Wind Cave's herd was long thought to have escaped?
Iktomi. In the version the park tells, the spider trickster sent a wolf down with meat and fine clothes, and those who followed it out too soon were turned into the first bison.
Q 14What do explorers find at the lowest known level of Wind Cave, about 500 feet below the surface?
Underground lakes
Underground lakes. They are where the cave dips into the water table, a window on the aquifer that supplies the region, and scientists study microbes living in their clear water.
Q 15Whose 1874 army expedition reported gold in the Black Hills, drawing miners onto Lakota treaty land?
Custer's
Custer's. His column of more than a thousand men found gold along French Creek, and within two years prospectors had poured into hills that an 1868 treaty had set aside for the Lakota.
Q 16Wind Cave is among the ten longest caves known; which American cave system tops that list?
Mammoth Cave
Mammoth Cave. Kentucky's giant has more than 400 miles mapped, while Wind Cave, once ranked fourth, had slipped to about sixth by 2025 as flooded caves in Mexico were surveyed.
Q 17Which longer cave, in the same county as Wind Cave, has never been found to connect to it?
Jewel
Jewel Cave. Long taken for a small cave, it now has more than 220 miles mapped, and the wind at its entrance suggests that only a few percent of it has been found.
Q 18All of Wind Cave's mapped passages, well over 100 miles of them, lie beneath roughly how much land?
About 1 square mile
About 1 square mile. Its passages are stacked in several levels and tangled into a maze, making it one of the most complex cave systems in the world.
Q 19Which limestone, named with the Lakota words for the Black Hills, holds Wind Cave's passages?
Pahasapa
Pahasapa. From a distance the pine-covered slopes look dark against the pale grassland, which is how the hills, and later the limestone beneath them, came by the name.
Q 20Wind Cave's limestone began forming about 350 million years ago from what?
Shells on a shallow sea floor
Shells on a shallow sea floor. The same warm sea left pockets of gypsum as it evaporated, and those pockets later set off the chemistry that hollowed out the cave.
Domestic cattle
Domestic cattle. Ranchers crossbred the two in the late 1800s; tests in 2004 found no trace in Wind Cave's herd, but whole-genome work in 2022 detected a little in every bison sampled.
Q 24Wind Cave's bison herd was founded with 14 animals sent west from which zoo?
The Bronx Zoo (New York Zoological Society)
The Bronx Zoo (New York Zoological Society). Its director led the American Bison Society, which bred the animals in the city and sent them out to restock the plains.
Q 25Which prairie animal was reintroduced to Wind Cave in 1914, a year after its first bison arrived?
Pronghorn
Pronghorn. A game preserve set up on the park's grassland in 1912 brought them back, shipped in from Alberta, to country that had lost its big grazing herds.
Q 26Which endangered mustelid, once declared extinct, was returned to Wind Cave's grassland in 2007?
Black-footed ferret
Black-footed ferret. Written off as extinct in 1979, it was rediscovered in Wyoming two years later, and captive breeding from those survivors made the releases possible.
Q 27The rare predator returned to Wind Cave in 2007 lives almost entirely on which prey?
Prairie dogs
Prairie dogs. They make up as much as 90 percent of its diet, and the hunter also moves into its victims' burrows to sleep and raise its young.
Q 28Fossils of which animal, about 30 million years old, were unearthed in Wind Cave National Park in 2003?
A rhinoceros
A rhinoceros. The early rhino Subhyracodon turned up a hundred years after the park was created, so the dig was named the Centennial Site; a horse the size of a greyhound lay nearby.
Q 29Which caving couple, better known for mapping a neighbouring cave, led Wind Cave's breakthroughs in the 1960s?
Jan and Herb Conn
Jan and Herb Conn. In 1963 the two rock climbers made the first breakaway from the known cave since the 1890s, pushing west into miles of virgin passage and the huge Club Room.
Q 30Which town just south of Wind Cave National Park is home to a sinkhole dig full of Ice Age bones?
Hot Springs
Hot Springs. Its Mammoth Site came to light in 1974, when a machine levelling ground for new houses struck a tusk; more than 60 mammoths have since been found in the old sinkhole.