America The Beautiful!

Daily Mileage =229; Trip Total=8688

We're starting out with the photo that goes with the patriotic title of today's blog. We've added another famous face to the monument! So, the question is, can you name all the famous people in the photo?
Obviously, we are at the Mt. Rushmore Memorial and four of the people are past presidents and one is older enough to be a potential (past) president!?!

Mt. Rushmore is really cooler than we expected. It's in the Black Hills area of western South Dakoda. We thought you'd go and take a photo and leave but the area is very nice to walk through with lots of information and exhibits. We did an audio tour that took about two hours and was great! (Highlights are: sculpted by Gutzon Borglum between 1927 to 1941; originally only Washington & Lincoln were going in but others were added; sculptor died a few months before finished so his son, Lincoln Borglum, finished for him; Lakota Indians weren't happy about the concept originally because of the sacredness of the area, now more open to it.) So , as you can see there's a lot to learn and see about the place. And, you do feel patriotric being there!

Before Mt. Rushmore we stopped at the Crazy Horse monument which is also a mountain sculpture that was started in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski. He was inspired and hired by the Lakota Indians to build a monument to honor the Native American people. He worked on it for most of his life and his family has taken on the mission to finish it without government assistance. When it is completed it will be much larger than Mt. Rushmore (in fact Mt. Rushmore will fit into the hair portion of Crazy Horse). It's a work in progress but it is quite impressive. Crazy Horse's face is done and now they are working on the horse he's riding. A million tons of granite have already been blown away and you can see they have a lot more to do. Here's a photo (not such a good one from afar) of the actual work and then a photo of the model of the monument. The sculpture is very impressive and the part completed so far looks great. Unfortunately our photo just didn't come out well!

Earlier in the day we went to Wind Caves National Park. It is a park that preserves two worlds, the one below which is the fourth longest cave in the world and the area above which is where the plains meet the mountains. This cave was discovered in 1881. One of the features that is different from other caves is that it doesn't have the traditional stalagmites and stalactites. It is a dry cave because of the wind that consistently passes through the more than 116 miles of discovered passage ways. (They are still finding more even today.)

We took a tour and of course it was neat walking through small spaces going up and down the walkways. This is a much better way than the way they used to tour with only a candle to light the way. You don't want to be at the end of the tour or you may never find your way out!

One of its prominent features is the boxwood which are thin, honeycomb-shaped structures of calcite that protrude from the walls and ceilings. (It reminded the discoverers of "mail boxes" hence the name.) This cave has one of the best samples in the world.

We then took a hike so we could see some of the ecosystems that are merging in this area. Buffalo were re-introduced here back in 1914 when the Bronx Zoo gave them 14 bisons. Now they have over 350 in the area and the west overall is really getting big numbers again. (My question is what did the Bronx Zoo think they were going to do with bison anyway? We've read that you need 35 acres for each head of bison. You'll get that in the Bronx, right?! And somehow I don't see the buffalo being to happy in cage!)

Actually the area is quite lovely. It has bison, elk pronghorn antelope and my favorites for this part of the trip, prairie dogs. The prairie dogs are all over and when they think there's danger around, i.e., people, they started "barking" to each other and then they run into their holes/homes. Rich's favorite thing was the prairie rattlesnake we ran into as we were hiking on the nature trail. It was kind of funny. The guidebook said you might see them and all of a sudden we did. We only saw one other snake on the trip and it left pretty quickly but this one hung around right by the trail. Needless to say we left it alone and moved on!

Overall, the Wind Caves was really a nice trip and we could have spent several more hours there (that seems to be an emerging theme on our trip!)

Finally, while we were driving through this area we came across a lot of "kitschy" areas. One that I made us stop at was Bedrock, USA. How could we not stop at Flintstone land? So, we had a Fred Big Dog (hot dog) at Flintstone Land. It was a "yabba yabba do" time. Rich begrudgingly let me photograph him at the "Bronto Ribs & Burgers Takeout Stand." So we've seen it all today and more to come tomorrow...

Love & Joy, Mare&Rich