South Dakota Girls Weekend, Sunday, Oct 6 2019

Kathi & Lori & Mt Rushmore

Sunday, October 6, 2019


Welcome back!  Thank you for joining us on another day of adventure.  After our normal morning routine, we pulled out of Rapid City to go visit Mt. Rushmore.  After a 30 minute drive we arrived at this iconic destination.  Upon getting out of the car we discovered that it was really quite chilly here, which fortunately our weather app had prepared us for, so that's why we are all bundled up in this photo!  Much to our disappointment, about 1/2 of the trail that makes a circle around the area beneath the mountain is currently closed for updating and renovation AND the evening lighting ceremony does not happen between September and May.  The monument is still lit at night, there just is no ceremony, which I have been told is quite impressive.  We rented the devices for the audio tour and began our walk around the parts of the trail that are currently accessible.  This truly is a beutiful and awe-inspiring place.  It is so hard to wrap one's mind around how one can carve a monument of this size into a rock face and have the result actually resemble human faces!! 

A visit to the sculpture's studio included a talk from one of the park rangers that gave us insight into how this is possible.  I have always thought the process included a lot of delicate hand work, when in fact, much of it involved sticks of dynamite to blow away portions of the rock!  We spent about 2 1/2 hours here and after returning our audio devices, got back into the car where we promptly ate the sandwiches that Kathi had made for us before leaving this morning and made our way towards Needles Highway, a scenic highway in Custer State Park, which is itself in the Black Hills National Forest.  This drive is not for the faint of heart.  It is only about 15 miles long but it is a incredibly curvy road that includes many hairpin turns, but MAN is the scenery spectacular!!  (My mom would HATE this drive!)  We also went through a couple of narrow (as in one way, one car at a time) tunnels that had been created through the rocks.  Stunning drive.

 

 

Kathi decided the rock formations here look like penises, thus deemed this the penis farm
(I can't really disagree)

Upon leaving Needles Highway our destination was the Crazy Horse Memorial.  Apparently this was the Native American populations' response to Mt. Rushmore.  They wanted to immortalize one of their heros.  Mt. Rushmore took 14 years to complete.  Well, not truly complete it as the artist originally envisioned, but complete enough to call it good.  The Crazy Horse Memorial is already 40 years in the making and no where near being complete!

Current state of Crazy Horse

Artists' vision of completed Monument

So, at this point, there is his face and the beginnings of his pointing arm.  That's it.  Forty years.  A very long way to go.  

We arrived here fairly late in the day and missed the last bus that actually takes you up onto the monument, onto the outstretched arm.  A couple of very nice elderly gentleman who were working the desk in the visitor's center/gift shop (who I believe thought that Kathi and I were a couple) gave us a pass that we can use to come back another day (without paying again), so that we can take that bus ride.  We have every intention of returning and doing just that.  Since there really wasn't much more to do or so here at this time of day, we decided to call it a day and go back "home".   We watched an episode of Law and Order, SVU and turned in.  

Tomorrow, we go to the Badlands.

Tossing of the states:  North Dakota is no longer in the running and I am OK with that.