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National Parks Road Trip & Alaska Sea/Land Cruise - April-June 2015
Mount Rushmore National Memorial & Crazy Horse Memorial
We left the Yellowstone area and drove to Keystone, SD which is near Mount Rushmore National Memorial and Crazy Horse Memorial.
Admission to Mount Rushmore National Memorial is free, but there is an $11.00 charge to park and since the parking is run by a private company the national park senior pass is not accepted. On the way to Mount Rushmore is a sign for free Mount Rushmore parking, it is for a pull-out where you can get a very good view of the mountain sculpture without going to the memorial. On the other side of the memorial entrance is a pull-out for viewing a profile of the sculpture, all you see is the side of Washington's face, no other part of the sculpture is visible. We opted to pay for parking and visit the memorial and we were happy that we did.
The walkway to the viewing area has the flag of each state and each US territory. The bases holding the flags are rectangular with one flag at the top of each side and a plaque on the side under the flag. Each state plague has the name, order of entry into the union, and year of becoming a state. Each territory plague has the name and year of becoming a territory. The order of the display is alphabetical with the territories intermingled with the states. As well as the viewing area there is a trail that goes to the base of the sculpture, we did not go to the base as we were content with the view we had and we had heard that the view at the base was not very good.
The highlight of our visit to Rushmore was the video about the making of the sculpture. Gutzon Borglum was the sculptor, he hired out-of-work locals to do the work. We do not remember the exact number, but well over 90% of the sculpture was done with dynamite. Borglum had made a one-twelfth scale sculptor of the memorial and hanging a plumb bob he would take measurements and with this information the workers, hanging in seats that were just a length of leather between ropes that were connected to a metal frame and dangled over the side of the cliff, would drill holes at the locations indicated and place the correct amount of dynamite in the holes. After the blast where there had been bare rock there would now be a nose or a set of lips or whatever it was suppose to be. The amazing thing is that these workers, though some had worked with dynamite in mining, had never done this type of precision blasting, but were still able to do it precisely enough to get the desired result. After viewing the film we visited the museum.
Sculptor Gutzon Borglum chose these four presidents to commemorate the founding, growth, preservation and development of the United States:
George Washington: the struggle for independence and the birth of the Republic.
Thomas Jefferson: the territorial expansion of the country
Abraham Lincoln: the permanent union of the states and equality for all citizens
Theodore Roosevelt: leadership in world affairs and the rights of the common man
After our visit to Mount Rushmore National Memorial we went to Crazy Horse Memorial. The entrance fee is $11 per person, there is a per car rate but it is more than the $22 for two persons. Very little has been completed on the sculpture at Crazy Horse. The indian's face is all that is completed. The indian is suppose to be Crazy Horse but no photos nor drawings of Crazy Horse exist, so the likeness is a composite of verbal descriptions of Crazy Horse. At the time we visited the site, no work had been done on the sculpture for 31 years. If ever completed the sculpture will be many times larger than the Mount Rushmore sculpture, but we greatly doubt that it will ever be completed or even that anymore of the sculpture will every be done. Korczak Ziolkowski was the sculptor who designed and started the project. He had many children, the boys were put to work helping with the sculpture, his wife and the girls worked at the visitor center and in the office. He studied how Borglum had sculpted Mount Rushmore and tried using the same techniques. Currently the site is run as a tourist attraction and is a memorial in name only. Though several people had told us and we had read several places on line that they were more impressed with Crazy Horse than with Mount Rushmore we did not agree. We think Mount Rushmore is by far the more interesting and impressive memorial.
During the day a couple of young women of American Indian descent performed hoop dancing, they were good dancers, but there narration was awkward & forced. We had a good lunch at a reasonable price. When we decided it was time to leave it was pouring outside, we waited a few minutes then made a dash for the the car. We were quite wet, but not what we would call soaked.
On the way to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse we had noticed the scenery was nice, but looking for the places we did not pay as much attention as we usually do to scenery. On the return trip to Keystone we really enjoyed the scenery. When we got back to Keystone we stopped at a Dairy Queen, Dale ordered a banana boat and was told they did not have any of the boat dishes left. They told her they could make a banana split Blizzard that was the same thing, Dale opted to get a hot fudge sundae instead.
(Pictures)
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jul 13 2015