mt rushmore and devils tower

bronte at mt rushmore

national monument

bronte's artistic shot

me at one of the displays at mt rushmore

both of us

at the front of the monument

tunnel on route to mt rushmore

devils tower

no shit on my boots!

bronte and devils tower

scenery near devils tower

Tuesday 15th June

An early start today after a nice breakie at the motel as we wanted to get to Mt Rushmore as early as possible and we needed to travel on to Cody Wyoming in the afternoon. Mt Rushmore was only about 35kms from the motel and was a nice drive. The weather today was beautiful with blue sky all round. We arrived at Keystone which is the closest town to the monument and it was very quaint but very touristy. The carpark was only a few kilometres on from there. The line up for the carpark was crazy, it seemed like everyone in South Dakota was going at the same time as us. The line up was due to needing to pay for the carpark, but there was no charge to visit the monument. Once parked we entered the front area which had a large concrete arbour which lead through to a nice strip that then lead through to the carving in the rock as the back drop. They had flags for all the US states on concrete pillars that had the dates that each state joined the union. There was a couple of walks that we did to get a closer look at the gigantic sculpture cut into the live rock face. The monument was constructed between October 4, 1927, and October 31, 1941, Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers sculpted the colossal 60-foot (18 m) carvings of U.S. presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln to represent the first 150 years of American history. These presidents were selected by Borglum because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory. There is so much US history here to take in and we spent a couple of hours just looking around.

Then it was off to Cody for the night with a detour to Devils Tower. Devils Tower is a monolithic igneous intrusion that is 1,267 feet (386 m) above the surrounding terrain and the summit is 5,112 feet (1,558 m) above sea level. We drove to the entrance of the National Park but we did not enter. We could see it well enough from the small town located only a few hundred metres from the base. The general store was cute too with a crazy sign out the front about scraping shit off your boots (above). Spent a little while there and then set back off as we had about 300kms to travel. Arrived at Cody at around 9.00pm and checked into our room. We then set out and had dinner which was DQ, Mmmm. After that it was back to the room for some R and R ready to hit Yellowstone tomorrow. Yellowstone is going to be good and after driving here 2 years ago and being snowed in and not seeing anything, it is long awaited..................