Black Hills, South Dakota

Sunday, August 14

  

Auggie and I left our campsite Sunday morning and headed west through more of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. Auggie needed a pit stop, so we stopped in Scenic, South Dakota. (Yes, that’s really the name of the town.) We found it scenic … in its own way. There were about six buildings in the town, most of them empty and decrepit. Take a look.

We made our way farther north and entered the Black Hills National Forest. Our destination was Keystone, SD, the home of Mount Rushmore. When I caught my first glimpse, I had a major “Holy Sh**” moment. Wow!

You climb some pretty steep hills on your way up to Mount Rushmore. And you are awestruck by how big it is. And then you naturally think, “How’d they do that?” And after that, “Why?”

90% done by dynamite. Symbol of democracy.

Mount Rushmore was carved between 1927-1941. The sculptor was Gutzon Borglum. Four hundred workers did the carving into the wall of solid granite. Their safety standards wouldn’t pass today’s OSHA standards, but no one was killed in the carving of Mount Rushmore (though there were a few serious accidents.)

On Mount Rushmore, you see the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. Borglum chose these to represent different stages of the first 150 years of our country’s existence: birth (first president), expansion (Louisiana Purchase), development (“trust buster,” Panama Canal, national parks) and preservation (kept North and South together, abolished slavery).

Calvin Coolidge was president at the time Mount Rushmore was proposed, and Borglum didn’t intend to put Coolidge’s head up on the mountain. What an insult, right? So Coolidge was offered a compromise – he was going to sign his name on a dedication statement that was to be part of the sculpture, thereby memorializing his name into the monument forever. With that offer, Coolidge approved federal funding.

But they screwed up! Jefferson’s head was initially meant to be on Washington’s right shoulder, not his left. Oops! They therefore had to readjust the order of the heads, pushing things to Washington's left, which also bumped the dedication statement off the mountain. Sorry, Mr. Coolidge. You just got dissed!

The sculpture was originally meant to have the full busts of the presidents, too. But Borglum died in 1941, it was wartime and Congress no longer thought it prudent to pour more money into Mount Rushmore. And so we have today’s sculpture, as it stood in 1941. Maintenance is done every year. (No, erosion doesn’t really affect the sculpture – it’s granite. They only expect about one inch of loss per 10,000 years.)

I also had the question, “Where does the name ‘Rushmore’ come from?”  Turns out Charles E. Rushmore was a New York City lawyer, who was out in South Dakota in 1885 on a surveying assignment. He asked a local municipal employee what the name of that mountain was. The employee said that it didn’t have one, but that they would call it “Rushmore” from now on.  How bout that – Mr. Rushmore didn’t really have a thing to do with the presidents’ sculpture at all!

We learned a lot this visit! And the first of my “must-see” sites for this visit has now been seen. Hooray!

After we left Mount Rushmore, we took off for Route 16A and the “pigtail bridges” – a series of serpentine bridges and tunnels that run through the Black Hills. Curvy, curvy up-and-down roads and beautiful scenery – weeeeeeeee! I LOVE driving roads like that!  J   (Thanks, Uncle George, for that tip.)

Yep, you guessed it – more bikes up there on that scenic drive. (I tell ya, they’re everywhere.)

Route 16A runs through Custer State Park, which is home to a herd of 1,300 bison. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bison on our drive through, but we did see some pronghorns, creatures I’d never seen before (they are not antelope, but are often confused with them). This group of pronghorns was really close, only about 30 feet across the road from us. Here is a photo of a male, who didn’t seem to mind us staring at him one bit. 

And here’s Auggie watching that male pronghorn!

We finished our pretty, scenic drive by finding our campsite in Custer, SD. Built another campfire, OD’d on marshmallows and watched the movie, “RV”, with Robin Williams, which we borrowed from the campsite office. I am happy to report that unlike Robin Williams in that movie, I have never been sprayed with waste from an RV sewer. Let’s hope it stays that way!