Welcome to the Buffalo Chip: Rally ‘headquarters’ host rockers, campers

STURGIS – Think of one of those harmless, Friday night keg parties in high school.

The ones in the cornfield with only the headlights of your car diffusing the night sky. Maybe a few more trucks show up with friends hanging off the tailgate, tires spinning in the mud. Someone’s playing the guitar.

But the next time, they come by the hundreds. Word gets out that it’s a pretty good time. Then, the next time, they come by the thousands and suddenly Ozzy Osbourne is on stage and says, “How did I not know about this friggin’ place?”

And this is how the legend of The Buffalo Chip goes.

“It’s just a special place for an awful lot of people,” says founder and CEO Rod “Woody” Woodruff.

He opened the campground in 1981 as a place for Sturgis Motorcycle Rally-goers to retreat to after the city wanted all the bikers to howl in the night someplace else.

Turns out downtown Main Street was the promenade while the Chip was the party.

They welcome bikers from around the world once more for the 85th anniversary of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the Black Hills of South Dakota through Aug. 10.

Who’s bringing the guitar tonight?

From Jerry Lee Lewis to Marilyn Manson

The Sturgis Buffalo Chip is unofficially known as the rally headquarters every August. There you’ll find tents pitched and RVs rolling in for nightly concerts, more than a dozen motorcycle shows, beach parties and beauty contests, and a stunning display of 800 American flags to honor the nation’s veterans and active-duty military members.

It’s more than 600 acres of “motorcycles, music, freedom and friends,” Woodruff says, and it’s “simply the best party anywhere for the nicest people on the planet.”

Michelle Caton, founder of the International Bikini Team, hosts nightly contests on the Main Stage and says the atmosphere at the Chip is unlike anything else she’s experienced at any other rally worldwide.

“This is an entire city in itself,” she says. “You could stay here during the entire rally and have the time of your life.”

Woodruff says he has room for “one million more RVs” and speaks as if he doesn’t even mind more than half a million people will be coming to belly up at his bar and on the picnic tables and definitely dance on top of them.  

But they’re all his “lifelong friends,” and you’ll make plenty, too, he says. “It’s like a reunion every year.”

Music at the Buffalo Chip started humbly four decades ago, with concerts “for a few hundred people” by Jerry Lee Lewis and Susie Nelson (“Yep, that’s Willie’s daughter,” the inaugural poster read in 1982). But it’s grown a bit since that “keg party in the pasture,” bringing to the stage Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe, Tim McGraw and ZZ Top, Poison and Billy Idol and the self-proclaimed “Buffalo Chip house band” Lynyrd Skynyrd multiple times over.

This year, newcomers Marilyn Manson and Gene Simmons will perform.

“We like to surprise people,” says Daymon Woodruff, Woody’s son and current president of the Chip.

He grew up backstage, “born during a ZZ Top concert,” he scoffs. Daymon experienced true mentorship working alongside his father from childhood, learning an appreciation of “all types of” music and people.

 “We consider ourselves happiness counselors,” Daymon says. “We just want people to feel free to express themselves and get away from all the doldrums in the rest of their life.”

Daredevils and bikes on fire

The performers are equally unhinged. For the rally’s 70th anniversary, PeeWee Herman zip-lined onto the stage during the 2010 Miss Buffalo Chip contest. And in 1992, amateur stuntman Robert Foley lit one of the Chip’s old outhouses ablaze so he could ride his bike through it.

On Daredevil Wednesdays, stuntmen will light themselves on fire and strap themselves to a limousine “like a hood ornament” to jump the Rusty Nail Bridge – and make it. They have 22 firewalls, highwire walks over the crowd, and a wall made of Monster Energy drinks for minibikes to barrel through.

In 2011, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith fell off the stage and broke his shoulder. In 2005, Toby Keith played in the rain. Woody says as soon as a single rain drop hit Keith’s “brand new hat,” it just hit hard, with 50mph winds and 4 inches of mud.

“But everyone’s attitudes were so positive,” Woody says. “They spent three hours sliding down the hill in a mudslide. Such good moods out here.”

Keith went on to return to the Chip five times.

Like the senior guests who honk their horns after every song during a municipal band concert, Woody says the crowd will rev their engines when they like what the artist is doing on stage.

“It’s the power of applause in itself, only magnified,” Woody says, as if it wasn’t rowdy enough.

Looking out for their Black Hills community

But the Chip is a sanctuary. The Woodruff family hosts a Freedom Celebration on the Thursday of every rally, a tribute to military veterans and active-duty members.

It began after army lieutenants showed up in 2005 to tell a couple that their son had just died in combat. Fellow active-duty members camping at the Chip put on their uniforms right there to have a missing man ceremony with the parents.

Another veteran who had been coming to the rally since the 1960s told his wife he wanted to be buried at the Chip when he died. Last year, he came for the last time, unwell and in a stretcher from his home in Fort Meade, to visit his friends at the Chip. He passed away shortly thereafter, and folks will have a memorial service for him this year, Woody says.

Woody and his family also low-key have raised more than half a million dollars for Black Hills charities like the South Dakota Special Olympics and the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum.

He’s given nearly $20,000 in scholarships for students at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, and also founded with his daughter, Toni, the Biker Belles, an annual rally fundraiser that celebrates female motorcyclists with mentorship, networking and a morning ride around the Hills.

But Woody and Daymon are just bikers like the rest. Woody has “a whole garage full of ’em,” and Daymon switches out between his 110-dirt bike and Ducati Scrambler. They live at the campground during the rally and always have the beer on ice ready for first-timers and the ones who will always return.

“We’ve got folks who tell us they stay in five-star hotels and can’t wait to get home,” Woody says. “Here, they stay in a tent in the middle of nowhere and never want to leave.”

The legend of the Chip will get you like that.