Day 19 – Black Hills, Mount Rushmore and Custer State Park, South Dakota

Day 19 – Black Hills, Mount Rushmore and Custer State Park, South Dakota

August 16, 2013

I woke up today dry (after the thunderstorms last night) and without a headache (after a mind numbing and nauseating migraine) – wonderful! We all had showers this morning at this RV park, which is a great and rare addition to our morning. I showered with the boys, which is always exciting and fast paced. We made our way back to camp after watching the real excitement for the day – the garbage truck pick up the dumpster outside the bath house – and had breakfast. Everyone was in good spirits today and we set off for Mount Rushmore.

We were prepared for seeing the largest crowds yet on our trip and were pleasantly surprised. The drive to Mt Rushmore is very beautiful and winds through the Black Hills forests. We loved seeing all of the bison intimidating tourists on the roads

and the many stone bridges that our RV just managed to squeeze through.

The National Memorial of Mt Rushmore certainly has the most infrastructure of any national park we have been to with attendants directing each vehicle to vast amounts of parking, huge stone steps leading to a promenade of all of the US states' flags framing the mountainside with stone carved statues of four of our presidents. In 2010, the park service added an amphitheater and many more steps creating an all-day tourist handling machine.

We walked up and took the mandatory photos of the statues.

I was most interested in the park ranger talk at the sculpture studio. There, we saw the models for the carvings and heard about the process of carving. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglulm created the scale models and made the measurements. A huge group of men, mostly miners and construction workers who were able to handle air tools and explosives hung from trapezes to cut away the rock. They worked on the carvings for 17 years until the sculptor died; his son took over for a short time and the project ended in 1941, without some of the planned detail of clothing and surroundings being completed.

Here is a rarely seen profile view of Mt Rushmore.

From Mt. Rushmore, we made our way to Hill City, which is a quaint western style town with a mix of Indian art, back country stores selling packing gear, and biker shops with Sturgis merchandise on sale (the big biker rally in Sturgis, SD was last week). We found Keen sandals for the boys to replace their old and tattered ones, ate lunch and sampled the ice cream there. After Hill City, we drove by the Crazy Horse site, but only looked from afar at the partial statue. We felt a bit burned out of seeing huge stone carvings in hillsides. We returned to Legion Lake campground and went swimming. The lake became more and more calm into the evening.

After dinner of steak grilled on the campfire and more corn on the cob (boys’ favorite), we sat under the stars and tried to remember campfire songs to sing together. Alle brought her guitar and ukulele along. Tomorrow, we cross SD, visit the Corn Palace and camp our final night at Niobrara on the border of SD and NE. Iowa is not far away now.