Mount Rushmore and Badlands National Park; WOW!

Siggy was a recent high school grad from Poland who we picked up hitchhiking in Big Sky, Montana.  Siggy told us not to go to Mount Rushmore.  He seemed to know what was best about our country as he had literally just flown into Chicago and then drove, with four of his buddies, to Big Sky on the West side of Yellowstone National Park.  An outsider’s view.  We listened to his advice, ponder it for a few hundred miles and expected to see a rather small representation of some of our most beloved presidents.

But Siggy was wrong.  Dead wrong.  On day five of the TBEX road trip we woke up just five miles from Mount Rushmore National Memorial.  Our campsite near Horse Thief Lake was quiet and just a bit dewy, but the skies held promise of a crystal clear viewing.  We had decided to not show up at 8pm with overcast skies the night before, in favor of catching the morning glow on the faces of those four, chiseled presidents in the morning.  It turned out to be a grand choice. 

Siggy did have one valid point.  As you can see from the photo above, most pictures taken of Mount Rushmore look a lot like the postcards for purchase in the gift shop.  It’s hard to really capture a different view of the presidents the way it’s possible to capture the many moods of, say, volcanic mountains like my favorite, Mt. Baker Washington.  And with only an hour and a half in the park, we weren’t going for any award winning shots. 

For me, the most exciting part was watching the making of Mount Rushmore in the park’s visitors center.  The 15 minute film is narrated by Tom Brokaw, a South Dakota native, and is an incredible story of the nearly two decades it took to sculpt the mountain.  Considering the tools available in the 1920s, I’m still amazed at the quality of the work finished.  It’s on a scale hard to comprehend and yet, there they are, staring across the Black Hills.

While this area of South Dakota holds many treasures, we don’t have time to discover them all on this trip.  And soon enough we were back in the car heading for Rapid City for breakfast.  Ahhh breakfast.  As Pam mentioned in her last post, breakfast is our main meal of the day and by now is highly anticipated.  While the breakfast in Rapid City was situated in the cute, tree covered, bronze presidential statued lined streets of downtown Rapid City, the surliness of the wait staff and slowness of delivery left much to be desired.  But nothing cheers up the day like posing with Ronald Reagan! (pictured at left)

Grasslands, grasslands, grasslands.  That’s what comes after Rapid City on the way to Badlands National Park.  It’s also what comes AFTER the Badlands.  Split into two distinct section, we opted for the more popular North district after a stop at the visitors center, which included another video not narrated by Tom Brokaw.  But it did a great job of showing the park in its many moods, complete with Buffalo that had eluded us, nocturnal ferrets we’d never see and freezing blizzards in the winter months.  Done with the video, it was time to see some seriously bad land.

Below are but a sample of the awesome geology and sights to be had on the drive along Highway 240 towards Wall and I-90.  It’s yet another park we wish we had extra time to explore but will have to save for another day.