How far is mount rushmore from yellowstone national park

528 miles / 850 km

Map of driving directions from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park

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Driving distance from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park

The total driving distance from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park is 528 miles or 850 kilometers.

Your trip begins in Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. It ends in West Yellowstone, Wyoming.

If you are planning a road trip, you might also want to calculate the total driving time from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park so you can see when you'll arrive at your destination.

You can also calculate the cost of driving from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park based on current local fuel prices and an estimate of your car's best gas mileage.

Since this is a long drive, you might want to stop halfway and stay overnight in a hotel. You can find the city that is halfway between Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park.

Planning to fly a plane instead? You might be more interested in calculating the straight line distance to fly from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park.

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Driving distance calculator

Travelmath helps you find driving distances based on actual directions for your road trip. You can get the distance between cities, airports, states, countries, or zip codes to figure out the best route to travel to your destination. Combine this information with the fuel cost tool to find out how much it will cost you to drive the distance, or compare the results to the straight line distance to determine whether it's better to drive or fly. You can print out pages with a travel map.

Driving non-stop from Yellowstone National Park to Mt Rushmore

How far is Mt Rushmore from Yellowstone National Park? Here's the quick answer if you don't sleep at all, or you have a friend with you so each person can drive some of the way, letting you make the entire trip by car without stopping.

Nonstop drive: 528 miles or 850 km

Driving time: 8 hours, 45 minutes

This is a pretty long drive, so it's not very realistic to drive nonstop. To get a better idea of how long this road trip would really be, scroll down to calculate how many hours it would take if you drive with stops.

Flying non-stop from Yellowstone National Park to Mt Rushmore

Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest distance is actually the "great circle" distance, or "as the crow flies" which is calculated using an iterative Vincenty formula.

Flight distance: 356 miles or 573 km

Flight time: 1 hour, 13 minutes

The straight line flight distance is 172 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.5x of the flight distance.

Your plane flies much faster than a car, so the flight time is about 1/7th of the time it would take to drive.

This is a relatively short flight in a private plane, but you might be planning to book a commercial flight. In that case, your travel time would really need to include how many minutes to get to your local airport, wait for security, board and taxi on the runway, land at the other airport, and get to your destination. Scroll down to see a more realistic calculation that takes into account all these factors to get a more accurate estimate of your actual flight time.

Let's say you're actually planning a road trip to Mt Rushmore, and you want to stop along the way to rest. If it's a real road trip, you might want to check out interesting stops along the way, eat at great restaurants, and maybe even find a hotel to stay overnight. That's what Trippy is perfect for, helping you figure out travel plans in detail.

Based on the length of this trip, we think you could spread out this fun road trip over more than one day.

Road trip: 2 days of driving

With the full itinerary planned out, we can estimate your total travel time for this trip.

Travel time: 10.5 hours on the road with 1 overnight

Itinerary

Start at Yellowstone National Park.

To see all the details on this itinerary, including recommended restaurants, hotels, and things to do along the way, check out the full road trip planner:

Yellowstone National Park to Mt Rushmore airports and flights

In the quick calculation above, we assumed you had a private plane and just wanted to know the time in the air from city to city. But for most of us, we're going to be flying on a commercial airline (whether it's first class or coach). So that means we really need to account for all the extra travel time getting to the airport, waiting for our flight, and making it to the destination.

To give you a better estimate of real-life travel, we've put together a flight itinerary with actual airports. Eventually you'll be able to customize this plan, choosing your own airports and flights. But for now, here's an example we've selected to give you an idea of how traveling might work between airports.

Departure airport: Jackson Hole Airport (JAC)

Arrival airport: Rapid City Regional Airport (RAP)

With the airports selected, we can estimate the travel time to and from the airport, based on how far the airport is from downtown.

Getting to the airport: 170 minutes

Getting to your destination: 69 minutes

Now finally, let's look at an example flight from JAC to RAP and figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, and time to taxi on the runway.

Commercial flight time: 1 hour, 13 minutes

So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Yellowstone National Park to Mt Rushmore including time spent getting to/from the airports, an estimated wait time of 2 hours at the airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, and the actual flight itself.

Total travel time: 7 hours

To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner:

Plan a trip to Mt Rushmore

Trippy has a ton of information that can help you plan your trip to Mount Rushmore. Start by reading the Trippy page on where to stay in Mt Rushmore. Check out some of the questions people have asked about Mt Rushmore like Family activities. Click the button below to explore Mt Rushmore in detail.

How far is it the other way?

The distance is the same either way if you're flying a straight line (or driving the same roads back and forth). But for a real trip, there can be plenty of differences so go ahead and check the reverse directions to get the distance from Mt Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.

If you happen to know Yellowstone National Park, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Yellowstone National Park!

What is there to do between Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone?

How long is the drive from Yellowstone National Park and Mt Rushmore?

How long should you spend at Mount Rushmore?

Is Yellowstone close to Mount Rushmore?