The 6-acre town of Swett, S.D., is for sale with its house, two trailers, workshop and operational tavern for $430,000. Not too pricey a deal except that as owner-mayor you’d be expected to live there.

Living, or traveling, in South Dakota takes a bit of resolve. Temperatures can range over 100 degrees in a year. I arrived on a Sept. 2 to tent camp, and it was 85 degrees. Eight days later the thermometer fell to 33, and the light snow flurries turned into 7 inches. No wonder the mammoths that once wandered here went extinct!

But southwestern South Dakota is so gorgeous with its fields of sunflowers and sandstone-and-granite Black Hills and Badlands that you learn to suffer some climate setbacks and travel with warm clothes and enough money to do motels when camping threatens to make you extinct.

What follows is my recommendation for a counterclockwise, family-friendly itinerary that will please adults and children.

Your regional airport destination is Rapid City, served from Hawaii by United, American and Delta airlines. It’s a low-key tourist town of 67,000 crammed with summer shops, restaurants and bars. Kids will love the free Dinosaur Park (even though the concrete dinos are painted green), Reptile Gardens with its snake-handler shows, and especially Bear Country USA — a car drive through land populated by black bears, wolves, elk, buffalo and mountain lions — all seeming to live peacefully together and unafraid of you.

And everyone must do the town’s Journey Museum, which documents Black Hills’ history from its geologic foundation through Indian occupation and takeover by white settlers. I rate it one of America’s finest museums.

COWBOYS AND BIKERS

But you’ve mainly come here for those special Dakota sights you cannot get elsewhere, and so you head northwest to the quirky towns called Lead (pronounced "leed"), Deadwood and Sturgis.

Lead and Deadwood are where the South Dakota gold rush started in the 1880s and mining continued until about 10 years ago. Yes, you can go in decommissioned mines. Deadwood retains its Old West buildings and has street "shootouts" at 2, 4 and 6 p.m. It also has gambling. Problem? Not there. The proceeds even paid for renovation of the Baptist church. The best $20 buffet anywhere is at the Silverado Casino. Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane are buried side by side in the town’s Jewish cemetery.

Sturgis is where you probably don’t want to be with children for the August motorcycle rally when about 400,000 (yes!) bikers ride into the town of 6,600 with bars that can hold a thousand. About 400 are jailed each rally, and lots of nearly naked waitresses find temporary employment. Put the Motorcycle Museum on your must-see list. It’s that good.

Some visitors like to hop up the highway to the town of Spearfish to see its extraordinary trout hatchery built on historical park grounds that beckon as a kids’ playground. Spearfish is where you pick up the spectacular Canyon Scenic Byway that winds 20 miles south through awesome scenery and takes you to Custer town and Custer State Park.

I’ve traveled the world but not seen much to match this amazing parkland we snatched away from the Lakota Sioux in the 1880s when we reneged on their sovereignty-by-treaty over the Black Hills.

The park has unmatched RV/tent camping, cabins and lodges on artificial lakes with wow-inducing roads: One goes through sandstone pinnacles, spires and tunnels, and the other through herds of bison that tend to stand on the roadway or come up to your open car window and stare back at you.

Alas, Black Hills Burger & Bun Co. in Custer doesn’t have the best burgers in the world, as TripAdvisor says. But some of the world’s fattest people go there! Better to do Baker’s Bakery & Cafe, or Buglin’ Bills where the old owner used to bring in his pet buffalo to amuse eaters.

Plan on a minimum of two days here because it’s also your best anchor-point for visiting Mount Rushmore. Rushmore was a disappointment. Maybe it’s just me. I’d hoped to walk through ponderosa pine forest and suddenly be confronted by the massive carving. But first you encounter a massive parking structure, then the massive Rushmore Memorial structure with the visitors center and restaurant, and finally the four carved faces seeming quite tiny and far away rather than overpoweringly huge and close. You’ll say "OK, we’ve seen Rushmore." The kids will say, "Can we have hot dogs now?"

BADLANDS AHEAD

There was a time when people headed 20 miles south to Hot Springs for the healing waters. The baths have closed. There is a warm-water pool with slides in a concrete building, but it smells like an old YMCA pool room.

The real reason to come here is to get up close with the mammoth excavations. That’s right — mammoths. They’ve found 61 so far. They all fell into a sinkhole and drowned about 26,000 years ago. The archeologists have built a structure over the pit with viewing walkways, and you can see the fossilized creatures and the continuing work. There’s a stunning exhibit of stuffed and skeleton mammoths, and the huge short-headed bear, which also went extinct.

From Hot Springs, head northeast to Badlands National Park. This being the Great Plains, you can see the Badlands at least 10 miles out. This was once an inland sea. The sea bottom uplifted, and the water sloshed out and in again, and finally out, and left 3,000-foot canyons of striated rock. It’s mostly sandstone, so if you come back in 500,000 years, it will all have eroded away. But for now you get two roads of spire-and-canyon viewing, rattlesnakes, prairie dog towns, board walkways to Grand Canyon-like overlooks, and bison.

Lodging is at the park lodge, the Badlands Inn or at Budget Hotel, a motel with cabins, teepees and RV/tent sites.

If you don’t eat at the expensive park restaurant, it will have to be breakfast of biscuits and gravy (only) at the gas station just outside the main park entrance, au jus sandwich (only) for lunch at the gas station, and dinner — well, the Horseshoe Bar has frozen pizza, frozen sandwiches and 5XL T-shirts for sale, while the Wagon Wheel Bar offers buffalo burgers and breaded chicken gizzards. Don’t make them laugh by ordering a salad! Oh, and the gas station offers fresh-slaughtered prime rib (only) on Saturday nights.

COLD WAR RELIC

And finally, en route back to Rapid City, you’ll definitely want to visit the old launch center for intercontinental missiles aimed at the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was decommissioned as part of the START Treaty of 2010 but is maintained as a museum by the National Park Service. They take you deep underground where two guys always sat, ready to turn their two keys and set off a searing World War III. You also can visit a silo with an unarmed missile. Tickets (free) are on a first-come, first-served basis every day.

It is an amazing way to spend a couple of weeks. Crowded in summer, of course. Susceptible to weather anomalies in spring and fall, but I’d pick those rather than the crowds.

If you have the time you can detour from Hot Springs into the huge Pine Ridge Indian reservation, but first do some reading on the Indian Wars and the Wounded Knee massacre. And be prepared to weep at the poverty, alcoholism and unemployment of the once-proud Oglala Lakota, generically known as the Sioux.