June 7th - Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota

We intended to walk the Volksmarch at the Crazy House Monument, but when we arrived, it was 40 degrees and a steady cold rain was falling. Knowing it would probably take 3-5 hours to do the walk, we decided to see if we would have better weather on the morrow. Instead, we changed our plans for the day to a driving tour of the northern part of the Black Hills area. Our first stop was Mount Rushmore, which was very impressive. Despite the steady cold rain we took the loop trail that leads to the foot of the monument and the studio of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum. This walk was quite short, only six tenths of a mile, but we only encountered a few folks along the way. It’s really a shame more people don’t take this walk because it offered several really different and great views of the heads of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln. Borglum was quite a character, a product of a Mormon polygamous marriage whose mother apparently ran off when he was 5. He, in turn, left for art school in his teens and married his art teacher who was 18 years older than he was at the time. It was obviously not, shall we say, a conventional family life, but he commenced his artistic career that culminated in the Mount Rushmore commission.

The artist’s studio has the 1/12 scale model of the sculpture as well as a “Hall of Records” which Borglum designed—it was started but never completed. The scale model was used to take measurements that were directly translated to the side of the mountain for the blasting and carving. About 90% of the sculpting was done with precision blasting and they showed videos of it which were both loud and very interesting.

The finishing touches were done with jackhammers and usually there were 12-16 air hammers at work on the cliff face at any one time. The on-site blacksmith had to sharpen over 200 drill bits every day! That must have been a job but the stone cutters themselves had to swing over the cliff face supported by bosun’s chairs like they use on sailboats, except that if it gave way they would smack into the rocks below rather than into water. Despite the apparent risks, they never lost a man during the 14 years of construction from 1927 to 1941. Quite a record, all things considered.

The Mount Rushmore cafeteria offered a limited selection of entrees at reasonable prices, but we decided to drive north to Deadwood in the hope that such a tourist-oriented town would have a wider variety of food offerings. The drive turned out to be as much of an experience as the town of Deadwood itself. It began with the steady rain we had experienced all morning, but about 20 miles out of Deadwood the road was closed and we had to take a detour on secondary (tertiary?) roads up and over the mountains to enter Deadwood via Lead, South Dakota.

To put it kindly, the detour road was not in very good shape. It may have once been graveled, but I couldn’t see any signs of that. Instead, we had rutted, potholed dirt that offered a great deal less traction than pavement especially as the rain was turning it to mud. To cope with this I engaged 4-wheel drive and drove extremely cautiously because 4-wheel drive doesn’t do a darn thing for a car’s braking action or sliding out on turns. I did OK for a while but the conditions steadily deteriorated as we climbed up to the 6,000 foot mark on the ridge. The rain turned to sleet and then to snow, and suddenly we were driving in a Winter Wonderland rather than a June vista. On top of the ridge the frozen slush topped the layer of mud and made for some very tricky driving indeed. I’m honestly not sure that everybody that started up that detour with me made it to the other side OK—it would have been very challenging in a 2-wheel drive vehicle.

I was relieved when we started back down and the snow turned back to sleet and then to rain. We saw some motorcyclists starting up the way we had come and I really felt sorry for them—it is so hard to control a bike on slippery mud and snow when you are freezing and your hands are going numb. But we made it to Deadwood and found a parking meter with an hour and a half time on it, so we parked and walked thru the old main street area looking for food.

What we found instead were slot machines--hundreds and hundreds of slot machines. Almost every restaurant and every store had slot machines and it was often hard to tell what exactly the main purpose of a store was, gambling or food, gambling or drinking, gambling or selling things, etc. We almost ate at one place but the lights and noise were just so overpowering that we left and finally ended up at Miss Kitty’s, which offered a Chinese and Mexican restaurant as well as, of course, gambling. But at Miss Kitty’s the Chinese restaurant area was separated from the gambling floor so it was quiet. Surprisingly, the food we had was really very good and the prices on the low side for a good Chinese restaurant. As we left, Monika tried her hand at the slots. She had two quarters and decided to recklessly gamble them away. On the first pull nothing happened, but on the second she was declared a winner of 10 quarters. However, those quarters don’t magically appear at the bottom tray. To be paid off Monika had to push the “CASH OUT” button to get her hard-earned winnings. Her winnings reduced the cost of lunch to $12.—including a tip, which we both thought quite reasonable. We finished off the day with a relaxed drive back to camp taking the interstate thru Rapid City rather than going back over that dratted ridge.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt