Two weeks ago, the Gazette let you know about the potential purchase of 79.1 acres to the southwest of Palisades State Park by the State of South Dakota, in hopes of enlarging the popular State park. The Gazette was partially incorrect about that number, as last Friday, March 1, SD Games, Fish, and Parks approved the acquisition of 257.5 acres of land that had been donated to the Parks and Wildlife Foundation. This acquisition more than doubles the size of Palisades State Park to 414.5 acres.
The Gazette spoke with Jeff Van Meeteren, the Southeast Region Park Supervisor for the South Dakota Game Fish and Parks on Monday.
“Palisades Start Park is the smallest state park in our system, and it gets the highest concentration of visitors,” he said. “Right now, Palisades has 157 acres and we have 34 camp sites and we have about 90 thousand visitors per year.”
Palisades State Park’s new manager Luke Dreckman confirmed this to the Gazette.
“This past year it was actually more than 95 thousand,” Dreckman said. “With the heavy rains that curtailed our activities, we might have made it to 100,000.”
But even with the high number of visitors, the park as is can only hold so many.
“We have no room to expand and there are many times during the year that we have to stop people from coming into the park because we’ve reached our maximum capacity,” said Van Meeteren. “There is no doubt it’s a popular spot. With the high volume of people wanting to come and visit the park, we’ve been desperate to increase the services, sights and amount of land in the park. Now, we have a real opportunity to do so.”
Van Meeteren elaborated that the non-profit arm of their organization, the SD Parks and Wildlife Foundation, was able to acquire three parcels of land. Initially, it was 80 acres from the Cooley family adjacent to the southwestern border of the park that runs along the creek out of the park. The Parks and Wildlife Foundation then put out feelers to the Schneekloth family, who agreed to donate 97.5 acres to the east of the Cooley land, and then another 80 acres are in the process of being acquired from the Nelson family on the south end of the Cooley purchase. This means 257.5 new acres of land will be added to the park, bringing the total acreage up to 414.5!
“This is the really big news here, we’ve more than doubled the size of the park,” Van Meeteren said. “Much of the land in question is ideal for development of new campsites. We could potentially triple the size of our campground.”
“There are a lot of ideas out there right now, a lot of spit balling as to what we can do,” said Dreckman. “We’ll be hosting public meetings to hear more ideas and get a direction as to what people want to do with the new land and opportunities it brings. Since all the new land acquisition follows along the creek to the south and west, we certainly want to increase access to the waterways.”
“We don’t really have any concrete plans to share as of yet, as the ink has barely dried on this land deal,” said Van Meeteren. “We’ve got a lot of great ideas about what to do with the land, both for campers and for day use park visitors.” He too noted that public meetings are in the process of being set up.
“We want to put the creek to more use, as kayaking and canoeing have become very popular in the area and we want to make it more of a part of what we do at Palisades, so non-motorized boat landings are high on our priority list,” Van Meeteren said. “This is in addition to redesigning the existing park structure to make it the best we can make it. Potentially, this could be a $4-5 million dollar expansion of Palisades State Park.”
More ideas that have been talked about are creating a new picnic area, an archery range, a trail system that runs the length and breadth of the park connecting all parts of the park both new and old, putting up a new golf course, or even helping to create a bike trail that again runs throughout the park and connects to Garretson.
“Garretson is our partner in this,” said Dreckman. “Our campers get their gas and groceries in Garretson, and we’re happy to send them there and continue that community partnership.”
“Whatever the future holds, it looks very good,” Van Meeteren said. “Our early estimates say that we could double or even triple the number of visitors to the park per year. Whatever changes occur, we want people to know that Garretson is the hometown of Palisades State Park and we’re always happy to work with the community to serve the needs of our citizens and visitors to our parks.”
The Gazette will continue to have coverage of this exciting addition as information comes available.
