Mt. Rushmore & Crazyhorse Monuments

We made it to Mt. Rushmore! What an awesome sight when you drive around a curve in the highway and there they are - the 'Faces' carved high into the side of a mountain! It's pretty incredible and hard to imagine how it was done using just dynamite, jackhammers, drills and manual tools. The faces are of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

Although you can see the sculptures from the highway and from the central parking area, if you want you can pay $8.00 for a yearly pass which allows you to park in the upper parkades and that gives you access to the plaza viewing area, the shops, theatres, hiking trails and tours conducted by the Park Rangers. My favourite view of the sculpture is still the one from the highway - it just seems to appear out of nowhere! tw

After dinner at the KOA, we took a 20 minute drive to visit the Crazyhorse Memorial - another huge sculpture carved into the granite face of a mountain. In a lot of ways, this monument is even more spectacular than Mt. Rushmore. Right now, only Crazyhorse's head is finished, but, eventually it will show him sitting on a horse with his arm outstretched and pointing towards the Dakotas - it is going to be huge. Much, much bigger than Rushmore. Even right now, all of the Rushmore sculptures could fit in just the 'face' of Crazyhorse.

The Crazyhorse monument site also had very intersting exhibits on display featuring a lot of the famous Indians who fought against General Custer at the Little Big Horn. There was also a free 20 minute film on how the monument was, and is, being built.

We are staying at a KOA campground called Palmer Gulch which is just 2 miles from Mt. Rushmore. It is more of a resort than a campground as it has a huge convenience store, a big swimming pool, hot tub, a full restaurant, a hot/dog and pizza place as well as a fudge factory. There are also water slides and a park for kids and a lot of horses here if one wanted to go horseback riding.

Our campsite is nice - a big, full service pull-thru that is quite close to all the park facilites and is also quite handy to the washrooms, showers and laundry. It was very easy to get in and get parked and setup. We got here about 2:00pm after leaving Mitchell, SD around 7:30am this morning. One thing that has changed for the better is the weather. It is a nice cool 18C tonight instead of the suffocating 35C we had all day yesterday in Mitchell. It has been a bit overcast since we arrived but we'll take that any day over the exhausting heat wave we've had since we left Vancouver Island on July 9th. This feels, and even looks, a lot more like home.

Tomorrow will be a full day of exploring all of the different sites around here so it should be an interesting day.

Jul 27, 2007

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