This year marked Custer's seventh annual Burning Beetle, a festival that brings people together around the idea of defending the Black Hills Forest against the mountain pine beetle, which has devastated millions of trees.
If the festival hoped to terrify the beetles into retreat, it may have worked. According to the Forest Service, the beetle epidemic peaked in 2012 and is in decline.
But if the epidemic is over? What will happen to the Beetle Burn? Is it a relic that will wither away like a beetle-ravaged ponderosa pine? Or have the people of Custer begun a new tradition, one that will steel them in the face of future epidemics?
"Eternal Flame?" travels to Custer to find out.
Eternal Flame? Custer Holds on to a New Tradition