Mt Rushmore and the Black Hills

Monday, September 21st.

We woke up this morning only to find everything around us as cold and foggy as it was last night when we went to sleep. Although our sleeping bags were no tropical resorts they were still warmer than everything around us, and it took us a while to gather the courage to crawl out of them and find clothes to bundle up in.

Our map told us that we were right on the outskirts of Badlands National Park, so we headed out of Wall on what we thought was the road that looped through the park. We drove for a while until we realized that we weren't on the right road, and that even if we had been it was too foggy to see much of anything, badlands or no badlands. So we drove back to the tiny town of Wall which, despite its size, is home to the Wall Drug Store, a tourist attraction that had been hyped and praised on billboards pretty much ever since we entered the state. We weren't really in the mood for tacky tourist traps, but since we were hungry for some (warm) breakfast we decided to check it out. Apparently it started out as a drug store back in the day which is why it still retains that name. But nowadays it is a huge one-story building that takes up an entire block. It is filled with tacky Western kitsch and seems to exist for the sole purpose of drawing tourists to small town that would otherwise not have much to offer the passing traveller, save the gas station right off the interstate. It lured guests with gimmicks such as free ice water (which wasn't much of an attraction on a freezing cold day), 5 cent coffee (with a surcharge of 20 cents for a paper cup if you wanted to take it with you) and lots of life sized cowboy statues to be used as picture props ("Bring your camera!"). And of course the mall -- as it really was -- had shops selling just about anything a tasteless tourist could want to buy. And for some reason it worked; even on a freezing off-season day there were cars parked all the way up and down Main St. The breakfast we had in the Drug Store restaurant was pretty good, although overpriced, but we didn't really buy into the rest of it.

As we walked out of the mall we looked at our van parked on the other side of the street and realized that the exhaust pipe had torn itself loose and was hanging only a few inches off the ground. It seemed to still function properly, though, so we bought some metal wire at the hardware store up the street and attempted to tie it back in place.

We then agreed that we'd pretty much exhausted Wall for all it had to offer us and got back on I-90 towards Rapid City. In a brochure we'd picked up at Wall Drug we found the address of an RV/Camping store on the outskirts of the city so we made that our first stop. And we found what we were looking for: an in-cabin heater to plug into the cigarette lighter of the van. Dan's aunt Connie had given us money to use towards something that would help us keep warm in the van as we went westward on our trip and this would be it, we decided. Following directions from the lady at the camping store we went to an upholstery shop to see about getting some new foam for Jens to sleep on. The guy who owned the shop was very nice and helpful and also had some really quality foam but it was way too expensive for our budget. So he gave us directions for a fabric outlet store down the street that would have cheaper foam. They did, but it still wasn't entirely what we were looking for. Instead we followed the directions we had from the lady at the camping store and found a Salvation Army thrift store on the other side of town :) We'd hoped they they might have some sort of foam or some comforters that we could use as a bed. They didn't, but instead they had a good selection of used cd's and we each picked up a couple of those.

We then drove out of town and took a very scenic drive through the Black Hills towards Mt. Rushmore. The sun finally came out and even though it was still chilly the scenery was all of a sudden much more enjoyable. We stopped at a lake along the highway to enjoy the quiet beauty of the still water and the majestic pine-clad hills around it.

As if the natural majesty of the Black Hills was not enough an idealistic sculpturer by the name of Gutzon Borglum once devised the crazy plan of carving four gigantic portraits of American Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln into the side of a cliff. Throughout the 1930s he labored to bring the idea to life, ultimately running out of life himself and leaving his son Lincoln to complete the project. In 1941 he did and thus gave the United States another national icon; the Mount Rushmore Monument.

And there's the explanation: No, we did not drive all the way through South Dakota simply to enjoy the dismal winter weather and to spend our hard earned savings on tacky souveniers at Wall Drug. We had come to see Mount Rushmore. And it was quite a neat experience. The drive through the Black Hills had felt sort of like driving through one of those 1960s Viewmaster reels of American national parks and tourist attractions. And seeing Mt Rushmore was like turning the reel to the final 3-D picture of the main attraction for which the reel no doubt would be named ("Mt Rushmore and the Black Hills in Glorious Technicolor 3-D! Feels like you're there!"). It was pretty amazing. The monument itself and the crazy idea behind it was quite fascinating, but even more amazing was everything that had sprung up around this one relatively little piece of rock in the middle of the Black Hills. At the base of the cliff was a huge granite fortress of a visitor's center, complete with a display of all 50 state flags, elevators, a restaurant and the omnipresent gift shop. To accomodate the hundreds of thousands of tourist that must visit it every year there was a large parking area that charged an $8 "annual fee" for parking, as if people might just 'swing by' on the weekends to have another look at the monument. In honor of cheap-skates like us, though, there was also a small free parking area further away which we of course parked at :) But that wasn't all: the town of Keystone -- which was no doubt once a nice secluded village in the mountains -- was nothing but gift shops, motels (that all had either "Presidents" or "Rushmore" in their name) and billboards advertizing Rushmore and Borglum museums ("Your Mt Rushmore experience is not complete without a visit to the Rushmore museum! Lends new meaning to the monument!"). We decided to settle for all the meaning and experience we could deduce from the monument itself and skipped the rest of the "experience".

Blessed by the off-season we only had to share Mt Rushmore with a few other small groups of visitors which made it a nice and relaxed visit. After soaking up all the atmosphere we could get for free we drove back down the mountain and headed south to stop by the Crazy Horse Memorial. Even crazier than the original Mt Rushmore plan, the Crazy Horse Memorial is a work in progress that will ultimately -- generations from now, no doubt -- produce a gigantic statue of Chief Crazy Horse seated on a wild stallion and pointing to the horizon saying "My lands are where my dead lay buried", expressing at once pride in Native American history and also drawing attention to the fact that the Black Hills were stolen from their original Native American inhabitants even after they were promised to them for all eternity (Why? Because gold was discovered there, of course). The monument will be the world's largest once it is completed. Crazy Horse's head alone will be bigger than Rushmore's 4 presidents combined. But considering that the monument was started in 1948 and that so far all that has been carved is the face of Crazy Horse the completed monument is still a vision far out on the horizon. The idea behind it is fascinating, though.

Heading onward from our brief stop at the Crazy Horse Memorial we drove through Custer State Park, which is home to a large wildlife population, including one of the largest free-roaming buffalo herds in the world. We passed through the park just at dusk, however, and didn't feel like we had time to linger too long. But on our way through we did see a grazing deer along the side of the road and a group of elks further on. We continued driving through the evening and ended up spending the night at an interstate rest stop somewhere in Wyoming.