Ponderosa Motor Lodge, Cedar Wood… Is Now Recreational Springs Resort

Hotel Impossible visited the Sturgis, South Dakota area for the Season 8 opener Full Throttle in Sturgis, which aired 2016-10-24, covering three properties packed with motorcycle-rally guests: Ponderosa Motor Lodge, Cedar Wood Inn, and Recreational Springs Resort. Google Places matches the location to Recreational Springs Resort at 11201 US Hwy 14a, which sits in Lead, South Dakota rather than in Sturgis itself, roughly 30 miles from the rally's home city in the Black Hills. The resort's own website, recreationalspringsresort.com, returned an HTTP 200 response on 2026-09-09 with 2026 copyright text and posted current hours, describing itself as a "gateway to the Black Hills" and listing a motel, cabins, a campground, recreational rentals, and a bar and grill under one property.

That structure suggests the motel and cabin components once marketed separately as Ponderosa Motor Lodge and Cedar Wood Inn now operate together under the consolidated Recreational Springs Resort name and management. The site lists a direct phone number and email for management and posts Sunday hours of 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. No additional news source was reviewed to confirm exactly when the properties combined under one name, but the live, currently dated website is the resort's own official statement of its current operations. The Sturgis motorcycle rally, which draws hundreds of thousands of riders to the region each August, remains the area's dominant seasonal business driver, and the resort's current site continues to market rally-season lodging and recreational rentals a decade after the Hotel Impossible episode aired.