Sheridan Lake, a reservoir, is located on Spring Creek in Pennington County, South Dakota. Built over the site of Sheridan, the first county seat, it is owned and operated by the United States Forest Service, and is one of the recreational areas of Black Hills National Forest.
Sheridan Dam was built in 1939 as an earthen structure, 134 feet tall with a length of 850 feet at its crest. Maximum capacity of the reservoir is 22,043 acre-feet; normal storage is 13,395 acre-feet.
Facilities include a marina, improved swimming beach, campground and group campground on the North Shore, campgrounds and swimming beach on the South Shore, and various picnic and overlook areas. The dam across Spring Creek is very small and assessable only on foot; lake water levels remain constant, as the lake is not used for flood control or irrigation.
Sheridan Lake is accessible via U.S. Route 385 north from Hill City, South Dakota and Three Forks or south from Lead and Deadwood, or a scenic route via Sheridan Lake Drive (a paved county highway) from Rapid City.
Famous quotes containing the words sheridan and/or lake:
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)