Trail would connect Rapid City, Badlands; Ranchers voice concerns about proposed route along rail bed

You can’t see the Badlands from the path alongside Rapid Creek in Rapid City, but someday it might be possible to keep following the path until you reach them. That’s the dream of the West River Trail Coalition, whose members want to convert an unused, 100-mile rail bed into a hiking, biking recreational trail stretching between Rapid City and Kadoka. The name given to the project is the Mako Sica Trail, after the Lakota phrase for the Badlands. Backers have completed a feasibility study and have lined up some help from Rapid City officials, who plan to build a small segment of the trail within city limits by next year. But little of the project’s estimated $21.5 million cost has been raised, it’s unknown who would manage the trail, and some ranchers along the route oppose the project. The rail bed targeted for the Mako Sica Trail was built in 1907 by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, commonly known as the Milwaukee Road. The company went bankrupt in 1977, and in 1981, South Dakota’s state government began acquiring hundreds of miles of the track to protect it for possible future use. But the line between Rapid City and Kadoka never was used again, and the ties and rails eventually were removed. The old line is now just a raised earthen bed with 83 bridges, 123 culverts and fencing along much of the route. Bruce Lindholm, rail program manager for the state Department of Transportation, said the state-owned rail bed is “railbanked” under the National Trails System Act. “That allows the right-of-way to be used for a recreational trail if everybody can agree on what to do,” Lindholm said. Keith Ham, a rural Caputa rancher who has land adjacent to the rail bed, said he’d rather live next to a train track than a recreational trail. Cattle can get accustomed to a train that comes at regular times, he said, but could be highly agitated by random comings and goings of bicyclists. He also fears litter, damage to fences and accidental wildfires, and he said people on the trail could be endangered by a lack of consistent cellphone service and by long distances from emergency responders...more