Rock Stars

There is a plethora of things to see in Custer State Park, one of them being the famous Needles Highway.  It got it's name from the granite "needles" that it winds through and was finished in 1922.  This lovely, winding and narrow road is not a place that you want to be dragging along your trailer, or be driving through in a large RV.  

 And it is not for people who are a bit claustrophobic, as you can see from the picture I took from the backseat of the truck.  We even pulled in our mirrors while going through one of the tunnels just so we were sure we didn't scrape the sides!  As Patty and I walked along the road in one place, we noticed bits and pieces from various turn signals and tail lights!

 Below is the Needles Eye Rock formation, which is aptly named.  

 And this is the one way tunnel nearby.  Its prudent to drive slowly in these areas, and especially to make sure no one is coming from the other way when you start to drive through the tunnels.  Both Patty and I were relieved and happy that Don was doing the driving.

 We made it and got to our destination of the day: The Rock Stars, or as most people refer to it, Mt. Rushmore!  Cobalt blue skies, a light breeze and warm weather greeted us.  We lucked out, since it is cloudy, overcast and much cooler as I'm writing this blog.

Not only is the monument awe inspiring, it's also a wonderful place to bring your children for a history lesson.  There is a lot of information regarding the building of Mt. Rushmore, and the Danish American artist, Gutzon Borglum.

 I found it interesting that, at first, the men who worked on the monument had to ascend 700 steps up the mountainside before they even started their jobs of blasting away the rock!  This is a picture of part of the steep staircase.  After months of doing this, their calves would probably have been like tree trunks.

 Later on, Borglum built a wooden cage with a brake to carry the miners safely up and down.  Makes me thankful I wasn't one of those men!  Neither of those would have been an option for me, and I would have become one of the support staff at the bottom of the hill.  Suspended over the side, hanging from a little swing and holding on to a jackhammer sounds pretty risky to me.  One of those brave men was sitting in the bookstore, signing books.  I bet he's the last of workers, or among the few left.

 Patty and I took the pathway (with lots of stairs) around the base of the monument, allowing us different view points as we passed underneath the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.

Another interesting tidbit is that originally, Jefferson's face was to be on the left of Washington.  As they started carving it out, they realized there was insufficient rock for the face to be completed, and it was blasted away in 1934.  

This is Borglum's scale model, which he kept refining as he went along.  The model faces were 6 feet high, and everything was multiplied by 12 to get the correct proportions when blasting was done.  Borglum not only supervised the construction, he also did tours to raise money.  When he was absent from the site, his son Lincoln was put in charge.  When he died in 1941, after surgery, his son came back one more season.  The project was left at the state of completion it had reached under his father's direction.  Makes me wonder if the Mt. Rushmore figures would have been more like the picture below, instead of just the busts if Borglum had lived another 5 years.  And that, my friends, is the end of this story.