Aug. 29, 2024

This paid piece is sponsored by Experience Sioux Falls.

It’s a Tuesday, just after 9 a.m., and visitors begin trickling into the Falls Park Visitor Information Center minutes after it opens.

They’re browsing the gift shop and making their way to the top of the five-story observation tower for a panoramic view before heading back down to explore the rest of Falls Park.

Matt Barthel, communications manager with Experience Sioux Falls, is there to watch, listen and learn.

“When talking with these visitors, it didn’t take long to greet people from nearly every part of the country,” he said. The stories even spanned the globe.

“After just a few hours, the staff heard compliments about the city and heard about the incredible American road trip many of these visitors were in the middle of.”

Two women from California stopped in Sioux Falls to check out Falls Park on their way to Wisconsin to see family members.

“A middle-aged couple who are both originally from Peru but now live in San Francisco visited with the staff,” Barthel added.

“The woman said as a young child she remembers seeing Mount Rushmore on TV and vowing to herself that someday she will go see it. Fast-forward many years and this woman was now finally able to check that off her bucket list. The couple drove to Mount Rushmore from San Francisco, spent some time in Sioux Falls and had plans to continue driving east to stop in places like Detroit, Chicago and Vermont, to name a few, before heading back west to go home.”

The couple lauded their time in Sioux Falls, he said.

“You have a beautiful city,” the woman told the staff at Falls Park.

Shortly after, a couple from Iceland stopped in, sharing that they were visiting for the first time because their daughter is going to school in South Dakota.

A couple from Bardstown, Kentucky, mentioned that it was their first time visiting South Dakota, with plans to explore Fargo, parts of Montana, Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, and then drive through Nebraska as they venture back home.

Later, a group of friends from Alabama and Mississippi stopped in, saying they’re exploring Sioux Falls for two days before going west to the Black Hills.

“A middle-aged man that grew up in the Sioux Falls area that now lives in Oregon reminisced on what he remembered from his time living here while he was back in Sioux Falls for a work trip and even coincidentally ran into one of the staff members that he went to school with in his younger years,” Barthel said.

The staff also spoke with a couple from Germany who were visiting the U.S. for the first time. They flew into Chicago and spent some time there before driving to Milwaukee and then Sioux Falls to explore, with plans to drive to Des Moines to visit friends, which was the reason for their overseas trip.

These were just a handful of stories that were shared by the many visitors who stopped by on that particular Tuesday morning. When the doors closed for the night, the staff had counted 421 visitors that day, and that’s only those who entered the Falls Park Visitor Information Center. There were many more people who visited Falls Park but stayed outside.

“While Mount Rushmore has long been a top destination on American road trips, it has become clear in the last decade that Sioux Falls is capturing the attention of not only people in other parts of this country but also around the world,” Barthel said.