Never a Wrong Turn (Ever): Mt. Rushmore

When I was in gradeschool, my best friend Sara's family took road trips every summer and my family went to Shoshone, Idaho to visit with my grandparents and camp in the Sawtooth Mountains on the headwaters of the Salmon River. I loved my time with my grandparents, but was always jealous of Sara's adventures when she would relay her wonderful experiences to me and ask me how the desert was. (The area around Shoshone is pretty much desert. Typical of grade school tact and empathy!) One of the places she described as heaven was Mt. Rushmore and I had never been before.

We started by driving to Custer State Park to find a camping place. When we arrived at the entrance a polite but decidedly unfriendly young woman told us we had to have reservations and directed us to a phone. The person on the phone was as pointedly unfriendly as the young woman, but I did get reservations at the Center Lake Campground. We paid a fee that usually comes with full hookups, cable tv and pool for a primitive campsite. Oh well, we knew it was a popular area. When we got to the campground we drove around the loop we were assigned and determined that we would have to drive the wrong way on the one way road to back our trailer in. As we were turning around Mike spotted a ranger and told him we would have to drive the wrong way. He responded, "I don't care which way you drive on the road" in a very grumpy tone of voice. I have to admit, at this point in time, I was NOT impressed with South Dakota! We camped and met a lovely couple from Michigan with two young boys. Dylan, age 7, spent a great deal of time in our camp petting Bernie and telling us about his life and his dog. He was captivatingly innocent.

The next day we drove the truck to some local towns, and to Mt. Rushmore. We stopped in Custer (why do we name things after him?) at a bakery to get Mike a roll and me some coffee. There was a mother (last name Baker - owns a bakery) and her two teenaged daughters running the store and it was fairly busy. The daughter that waited on us wasn't rude, but I can't say she was friendly either. But when she said to her mother, "I thought that the crowds were supposed to be over", I realized that all the grumpy people were still reacting to the 500,000 to 600,000 people that had been in the area for the Sturgis rally.

These bison were on every corner of Custer (all 6 of the corners) This one is on vacation with his palm tree.

We saw Mt. Rushmore, and it is not heaven as Sara led me to believe. It is interesting but I do wonder why we humans have to put our likeness everywhere. We also saw the beginnings of the Crazy Horse monument, also carved in stone.

Crazy Horse

We drove a loop, and the final stages of it we on a road that litterly climbed in circles, using bridges to cross over the road we had just driven on. We were so glad we didn't have the trailer with us. This road also had some short and narrow tunnels that the trailer would still be in if we had towed it on this route.

There is enough granite in this area to cover every countertop in America!

We stopped at a reconstructed stockade with a couple of original cabins inside. We learned that our first efforts at treaties with the plains tribes gave (gave probably isn't the correct word when the tribes were there first) them the Black Hills. When a white man believed that he had found gold in the hills, people began coming in droves and the US government was having difficulty stopping them. This stockage site was built by men defying the treaty. Eventually, the US gave up enforcing the treaty and then later, changed the treaty to greatly reduce the land of the tribes. Apparently, there is a great deal of tension caused by the Mt. Rushmore carving being in the Black Hills.