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6/21/02, 11:00 p.m., Rapid City, South Dakota
It was yet another interesting day on our magical, mystical tour. We started by heading down the road to Mount Rushmore, which was to be one of the highlights of the tour. It is an awesome sculpture, but it was the one place that we have been on this whole trip that was overcrowded, where too many people and too many screaming children were all crowding around and pushing around to see the same views.

Mount Rushmore from the Highway
Mount Rushmore


We did do the Presidential trail, which was a lot less overcrowded, though I had to admit I am really out of shape. I was about dying by the time we ended up coming back up the other side.

Where the monument is supposed to leave one feeling all patriotic all I could think was that those four Presidents must be looking down on all of us with dismay. Could any of them have ever imagined that we would turn into the country we have become? I think each of them would be horrified at a great many of the things that have changed since each of them was in office. Lincoln at Rushmore

One of the men who worked on blasting the sculpture during three years near the end of the work was at a table in the gift shop. He graciously signed autographs and talked to people about himself and about the monument. He went to work on it when he was only 17 years old, in 1938. That was actually the most interesting part of the experience for me.

From Mount Rushmore we went on down the road to the Crazy Horse Memorial, which I must admit I actually liked a little better, though it was overpriced for how little is actually done on the sculpture.
Crazy Horse Memorial
Crazy Horse (frontal closeup) Crazy Horse and Model 2 Crazy Horse, Wooden Bust


Nevertheless the history of it was very interesting and all the displays on the grounds, with the workshop, Indian museum, and more, caught my attention. The last thing we saw there was some Native American dancing. Lakota Dancer Dancer and Drummer
A father played drum while his son and daughter danced for the crowd. It was an incredible display and fulfilled one of my goals of the trip. I had told Brian early on that I would like to go to a pow-wow or see something authentically native like ceremonial dancing, so this fit the bill for that, and was totally unexpected. We didn’t know in advance that it was part of the activities at the site, so it was a pleasant surprise.

After Crazy Horse, I wanted to have Brian drive the Needles Highway, Needles
as I had been on it before and knew how beautiful it was and wanted to share that with him. It was as beautiful as I had remembered, with very sharp hairpin turns and extremely tight tunnels that had to be passed. The scenery on the highway is astounding, with tall, needle-like spires stretching up to the sky, mountain and valley views, and other odd rock formations.

The last part of the day proved to be the Wildlife Loop Road in Custer State Park. We had hoped to do more, but had spent too much time on the first three parts of the day, and decided just to head home after we did the loop. It was somewhat disappointing, as we only saw one buffalo on it (though we had gotten some nice buffalo photos previous to the Wildlife Loop Road in Custer State Park), even though there are over 1,500 buffalo in the park, constituting one of the largest single herds anywhere in the country. Buffalo Closeup
The other disappointment was that the begging burros never appeared. We had bought carrots to feed them. I had seen them before and we had heard from a little girl last night that she had fed them that day. I had assumed it was something that was always a part of the Wildlife Loop Road, but apparently that is not the case.

We did have some nice surprises today, too, though. One was that we finally got some closer deer shots and finally got some photos and videos of antelope. White-Tail, Custer State Park Antelope
We saw many antelope on the loop. We also saw another Eastern Swallowtail butterfly and another orange butterfly that I had never seen before. Butterfly, Custer State Park, South Dakota
And, while we were at the Crazy Horse Memorial we saw a marmot just off the side of the road.

After all the driving we went up the road a bit and ate at a buffet. After a week of mostly hamburgers, pizza, and similar type foods, it was good to get some home cooking, things like potatoes and gravy, ham, green beans, etc. It was greatly needed.

Tomorrow we start our drive across South Dakota with stops at Wall Drug and the Mitchell Corn Palace, followed the next day by the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. After all the mystical, natural sights I am looking forward to the lighter, trashier side of things on the way back.

Finally, I got a message from Tara about an e-mail from Wisconsin Trails. Last Friday, before leaving town I mailed the first twenty pages of my book on touring around southern Wisconsin. I dialed up my Internet service long distance to check out the message and it was pretty good. While the editor felt that the book was too broad in scope for them he is very interested in producing a book of my photos on a more specific locale, such as a travel book on southwestern Wisconsin. He also said that the magazine creative person would be interested in talking to me about photos for the magazine as well. To have heard something that quickly and that positively only makes this vacation that much better!

One P.S. for tonight. I had forgotten to note in yesterday’s entry that as we were nearing Rapid City we went through an incredible downpour of rain, one of the few moments of bad weather we have had so far. But parts of the sky were sunny and a beautiful rainbow developed, very thick, and it stretched well up into the sky. As we drove along I noted the other end of it, reaching well up into the sky. Of course we didn’t see the whole thing, but a significant portion of it. As we were stopped for me to get a photograph of it a freight train started driving underneath it. I had been hoping to get a picture of a train crossing the plains the whole trip and here it presented itself to me. The train crossed through the one ribbon of light that had been created by the sun and made for some good photographs. BNSF Train near Gillette, Wyoming
I had also managed to get a picture of a smaller train in the city of Lovell, Wyoming earlier in the day.

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