Mount Rushmore 6-17 June 2010

We landed at the Palmer Gulch & Mt Rushmore KOA just outside of Hill City, SD in the heart of the Black Hills on the 6th of June. This KOA is what’s called a most complete resort and boy it has just about everything including 10,000 or more kids running around! It has 500 RV and tent sites, 55 Kamping Kabins, 30 mountain cabins, 6 executive lodges, a 62 room lodge with a 2-story fireplace in the lobby, a restaurant & lounge, gift shop and store, a pancake tent, and 18 different activities to include trail rides (horses are right there on the property), chuck wagon dinners, fishing pond, ATV & bike & car rentals, shuttle service to the monument, several different eating places, wine and coffee bar, and much, much more for the kids! And did I mention 10,000 kids all running in high gear from morning till quiet time!!! I must say we were impressed with the management of all of this…nothing was left undone and everyone was very helpful. However, we were used to more of a quiet, serene and visually appealing type of RV Resort...needless to say, we managed to get through it while visiting the special sights around us.
The first visit was to the evening lighting ceremony at Mt Rushmore which lasted about 90 minutes. The mountain carving features the 60 foot faces of four of our great American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Work on the sculpture began in 1927 when sculptor Gutzon Borglum was 60 with work ending just after his death. He wrote “let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breath a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away” There is a Borglum visitor center and a Museum along with the avenue of the state flags leading up to the amphitheater. The "show" consists of a naration of a lot of history provided by one of the park rangers and at the end before the designated boy scout troup of the country brings down the flag, they asked that all serving or prior military service members come on the stage to be part of the ceremony. We decided that the women needed to be represented so down we hiked the many steps to the stage of the amphitheater. We have had to stand in many places to honor veterans and those currently serving, but we were taken aback by the enormous crowd giving us a very long standing ovation, clapping of hands and hollering for more than five minutes. We were in tears especially when one of the men said it was great to see some women represented. We noted through all of our travels in the mid west; these folk seem to be much more patriotic than most.
Crazy Horse Monument is the fifth granite face in the Black Hills which is still in progress being kept going by the sculptors’family (Korczak Ziolkowski). Work was started in 1948 which was requested by the Lakota Indian tribe as a tribute to Native Americans and when complete will be the world’s largest mountain carving, standing some 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Crazy Horse said “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”He defended his people and their way of life in the only manner he knew after the 1858 treaty, which had stated that the Black Hills of Dakota will forever be the sacred land of the Sioux Indians, was broken. He was stabbed in the back by an American soldier while at Ft Robinson, Nebraska under a flag of truce in 1877. There is also a large orientation center and the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, as well as the sculptor’s studio-home and workshop with a lot of his pieces of work on display along the many gifts presented to him and his wife who now oversees the enterprise along with a part of their 10 children. Some of these gifts are pictured here, like the motorcycle and stage coach. They have refused to accept any Government funding for this project so it may take at least another 40 years for the sculpture to be completed.
We visited a museum in the town of Hill City, which was the nearest to our camp site, called the Museum of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research which is a small business, yet their produced specimens are seen in museums and other venues throughout the world. They are an innovator in fossil preparation techniques. This is where STAN T REX is usually housed but was on loan to another museum. They have dozens of other dinosaurs, fossil fishes, reptiles, mammals, birds, plants and the most incredible collection of invertebrates in the region, along with local and world-wide meteorites, agates and mineral specimens. It was all very interesting and we took some photos for your viewing pleasure. Maybe you already knew but it was actually a surprise to us that South Dakota is so well known for its fossils...hadn't a clue before we got here! Learned interesting tidbits about "Sue", the largest T-Rex find to date which has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it. Apparently one of the curators at this institute actually found "her" on nearby land where the "owner" said it would be ok for the instutite to excavate and take her. Another landowner said it wasn't the original owner's land and it went to court only to find out that it wasn't either party's land...it was government land. Anyway Sue ended up being auctioned with the winner being the Field Museum in Chicago. This little Institute must have been heartbroken after all the work they put into getting her "out" of her graveyard...
We have to admit, we went through quite a bit of rain during our stay in the black hills. That didn't stop us though. One day we drove through Custer State Park which covers 71,000 acres in the Black Hills and also stopped to have dinner in the town of Custer at this old bank turned into a restuarant. Excellent steaks and it was fun knowing we were in a building with such a long history...late 1800s :-). As can be guessed, both the town and State Park are named for ole George A. Custer who in addition to leading that death charge, also led a "secret" army expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold, which of course, was discovered. Custer Park is home to the nearly 1,500 free roaming buffalo. There are several road trips one can take through the park and the one we were most impressed with was Needles Highway. The name comes from the slender granite peaks that characterize the area. It is 14 miles of hairpin curves and narrow granite tunnels and the beautiful Sylvan Lake. There is one section called the Cathedral Spires, a series of pinnacles that resemble church spires and a granite formation that looks like the eye of a needle. There is also the Wildlife Loop in which you might see some mule deer, elk, prairie dogs, wild turkeys and pronghorns...which of course, we did see! Then there is Iron Mountain Road which in the beginning they said it couldn’t be built…but the Governor, Peter Norbeck didn’t listen; he himself mapped it out on foot and on horseback. It is now called the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway and leads from Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore and along the way three granite tunnels frame Mount Rushmore perfectly in the distance. It has been named one of the ten Most Outstanding Byways in America. It really captures the splendor of these ancient mountains. We loved all of it and took a lot of photos as you will see...don't miss ole George's profile on some of the "rock" shots...You also might notice dead looking trees and piles of wood called tree stands stacked very neatly on the forest floor. This area has had serious beetle problems wherein the beetles attack from inside the tree, sucking the life out of it...don't even know the tree is infected until it's dead...apparently the stands isolate the beetles to those stacks where they basically starve to death...don't ask us how that happens...anyway, we also learned out to identify ponderosa pines...they are literally red (rosa) on one side (the side that gets sun). They are quite pretty and plentiful in this area. maybe you'll be able to pick some of them out. We hope so.There was a rainy day that Debra decided she wanted to go to Wind Cave National Park which is 132 miles of known underground passages and 28,295 acres of above ground wilderness and wildlife. It is the fourth largest cave in the world. She went on a ranger guided tour while I visited the gift shop and stayed with the dogs. She said afterward that she was glad I hadn’t gone because I definitely would have been claustrophobic. Especially after imagining what it must have been like when they first discovered this cave and how DARK it would have been! This cave was not as colorful as others we’d seen but it did have unusual rock formations, to include what is called “box work”. Bet you can pick it out…Afterward, we had lunch in a great little town called Hot Springs in a local restaurant…It being a Sunday, it was packed and we sat with several folk who were also traveling and one family who lived there. We had a great time talking with them and it was a huge meal for a very small price…liked that! Although plenty of rain on this leg, we both enjoyed this part of the country and looked forward to our next stop...the Badlands...