Sturgis Motorcycle Rally revs up with throngs of bikers
This weekend, hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists from across the country will start pouring into Sturgis, S.D., for the 78th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally that runs Friday through Aug. 12.
The rally is one of the largest, and oldest, biking events in the country. This year it’s being held about three weeks ahead of Harley-Davidson’s 115th anniversary celebration in Milwaukee during the Labor Day weekend.
Sturgis is a small town nestled in the Black Hills of South Dakota, not far from Mount Rushmore and Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming.
The rally spills over into area campgrounds for miles, and between the campgrounds and bars, it’s as much a music festival as a biker event.
This year, those concerts at the Buffalo Chip and Full Throttle Saloon include headliners such as Trace Adkins, Eric Church and Foreigner. And there’s The Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Steppenwolf.
Scenery is biggest draw
Sturgis also has some of the most beautiful motorcycle riding in the country, with hundreds of miles of back roads sweeping through South Dakota’s Black Hills.
“The biggest thing people come here for, year after year, is the Black Hills. That never gets old,” said Jerry Cole, Sturgis rally director.
“You also meet people who become your friends. On one of the rides last year, there were two couples from Australia who lived 30 miles from each other but had never met,” Cole said.
Steve Piehl of Milwaukee is already in Sturgis, having spent a couple of days this week cruising the Black Hills on his Harley.
There’s a certain magic about Sturgis that’s hard to replicate anywhere else, according to Piehl, who during his career at Harley-Davidson Inc. was credited with starting the company's Harley Owners Group, which now has chapters around the world and more than a million members.
“It’s really the confluence of great riding, great people and lots of motorcycle activity,” Piehl said, that defines the Sturgis rally.
It's hard not to be impressed with the bikes, in nearly every style imaginable, cruising Main Street in Sturgis. The rally has morphed in size from a gathering of bikers that came to watch races and hang out, to an international event that in some years has attracted more than 700,000 people and has become a moneymaking machine for bars, restaurants and hotels.
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Sturgis officials say it's hard to put a dollar value on the rally because it's spread out over western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. But given that the average rallygoer spends $198 a day, the 2017 event generated nearly $750 million in direct and indirect spending in South Dakota, according to state officials.
South Dakota Department of Transportation numbers showed that by their estimates, 469,103 vehicles entered Sturgis during the 2017 rally, and it's a safe bet that most of them were motorcycles as Main Street is blocked off to cars for the event.
It's been a peaceful rally over the years, especially as bikers have gotten older, but area hospitals, clinics and urgent-care facilities brace for a surge of patients from bike crashes and other incidents that happen when hundreds of thousands of people get together, and there's a lot of partying going on.
Last year, there were 68 injury crashes, 18 more than the year before.
Transportation Department officials say they're putting up temporary traffic signals and signs throughout the Black Hills to ease traffic, reduce speeds and increase safety.
"The highway patrol will be out in force as they always are during the rally," said Tony Mangan, a South Dakota Department of Public Safety spokesman.
More than 160 people were arrested for drunken driving at last year's rally.
This year, police said, they will have sobriety checkpoints in four counties.
"Share the road ... and don't get distracted," Mangan said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.