Craig's blog

This morning we had eggs, toast and Casaba melon for breakfast and then headed off to explore the black hills of South Dakota. We started by driving the needles highway. It was a pretty drive with some interesting spires of granite that give it its name.

Next we headed east toward Mt. Rushmore. I visited Mt. Rushmore when I was a kid and in some ways it was exactly as I remembered, and in others, very different. When we drove up it was like driving in to Disneyland. Lots of lanes for folks to drive up and pay their money to park. It was $10 to park. Driving in to the parking lot was wild. There are two, multiple story parking garages in addition to the huge outdoor parking. Walking in again feels a little like walking in to an amusement park. There are food concessions, guided audio concessions, visitor center, amphitheater, gift shop, etc. Once you finally make it past all that stuff, Mt. Rushmore looks as I remember it. The one thing that seemed better than my memory (although I may remember incorrectly) is that there is a 1/2 mile path that you can walk along that gives you a number of views of the sculpture as well as the scraps of granite that fell down, the trail the workers climbed up, etc. All in all I found it an impressive sculpture wrapped up in an ugly very American package.

We then drove to the Crazy Horse sculpture nearby. I was also quite underwhelmed there. The basic story is that a man agreed to create a gigantic sculpture of Crazy Horse riding a horse out of granite. The scale of the effort appears to me to be at least 30x that of Mt. Rushmore. The guy started working about 50 years ago by himself. Since then more people have started working on it and he’s since died. However, his family has taken up the effort (and he had 10 kids). The plan is to carve Crazy Horse from the waste up and his horse from roughly the shoulders up. At this point they’ve done Crazy Horse’s face. I’d be surprised if they are 10% done.

The bulk of the place is dedicated to generating money so they can continue to make progress on the sculpture. If ever is completed it appears it might be quite awe inspiring, but man is there a long way to go.

We were pretty fried from these two events so we drove in to town (Custer) and got some ice cream and then drove back to camp. We had a relaxing couple of hours around camp and barbecued some chicken. We had some fun/excitement when a buffalo bull rambled in to the small campground after dinner. We all stood around and watched him eat grass on the outskirts of the campground. Then he decided to wander in to the middle of the camp and preceded to lie down next to the pop-up trailer in the site next to ours. A number of folks were rattled and while we went on about our business of cooking some-mores and packing up camp, we did it with a cautious eye on “Theodore H. Bison” as Kelly named him. H stands for huge. :)

Eventually the campground host called a ranger who came in and scared him away so he went lumbering away. I think he would have been happy to have slept there. He seemed very relaxed.

Here are some shots from the day.

Tomorrow we’ve got our longest drive ever (in miles) with the trailer - over 500 miles to Bozeman Montana.