Mount Rushmore

Today we went up to see Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which is about a ten-mile drive from the RV Park where we are staying.  I saw this Monument when I was five years old and remember seeing an Indian Chief here at the time.  He spoke to me saying, “How!” as he raised his hand probably mimicking the Western movies of that era.  I think he made more of an impression upon me than seeing the faces of our former Presidents.  Also then there was no massive Visitors Center nor an amphitheater or an evening light show either.  Today a young woman of the Lakota Tribe demonstrates hoop dancing wearing their beautiful traditional beaded clothing. 

We started off under cloudy skies and arrived before any rain had fallen at the Monument with the muted light making for good photographs devoid of shadows.  Eventually the weather came in with rain starting to fall, so we toured the museum onsite and had lunch and browsed the gift and book shops.  We enjoyed a movie that demonstrated the difficulty of sculpting each President's likeness into the granite rock with workers literally hanging off the cliff and ultimately the sculpted faces to do the work.  It even took dynamite precisely positioned and of exacting amounts to blow away layer after layer of stone to achieve the shapes of their faces.  The workers could only work on the project about six months a year because of the weather so progress was slow going.

The man called in to oversee and devise the sculpture process was named Gutzon Borglum.  He had gained fame for doing several works including the sculptured memorial in Georgia near Atlanta called “Stone Mountain.”  Born in Idaho in 1867, Borglum was the son of Danish Mormons. He studied art in Paris before coming home to work along side his artist brother, Solon.  President Coolidge dedicated the memorial in 1927 and Borglum went to work.  Up until his death in 1941 at the age of 74, Borglum along with 400 workers fashioned the heads of the Presidents over 14 years at a cost of nearly $1 million.  His son Lincoln Borglum supervised the final completion of the Memorial after his father's death until work stopped in October 1941.  Today, more than three million visitors from across the country and around the world come to view his work.

The rain came in earnest and we rapidly retreated to our car in the covered parking lot with huge drops hitting our heads, laughing and holding hands down the stairs to reach the dry second level. Ten miles of driving ensued through rain that became quickly became sleet piling up along the road looking like an inch or more of snow.  The accumulating water rushed downhill along the edge of the road carrying the sleet with it and pushing it into piles where ever  there was a break in the edge of the road.  It was as if someone had run down the road in front of us with a bottle of dish detergent creating piles of suds.  We got home after a very slow drive to a talkative Snoopy who was protesting loudly about the weather in his Siamese voice.  September 1st seemed like an unlikely start to the winter season but we felt like it had suddenly arrived.  A nap and two hours later yielded sunny weather under clear blue skies as if the rain had been a dream.