After an early start for a long day we head off for a short visit to Mt. Rushmore. We have our first views of the Presidents well before we actually get into the National Memorial, they’re pretty striking even at a distance.
Looking in the entrance.
Once inside the memorial we get the full effect of the monumental carvings and we hike along the “President’s Walk” which takes us under the heads and through the woods. I was ready to be underwhelmed by the whole Mt. Rushmore “schtick”, but I’m surprisingly impressed and can’t stop taking photographs from every new angle of the four heads that we’re exposed to along our walk.
The Guys...all that scrap is from the sculpting.
The trail leads to the studio of the monument’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. It’s a fascinating museum about the monument and houses a large working model of the sculpture, machinery including a monstrous compressor that supplied air to the many jackhammers, and lots of old photographs and other artifacts.
Donald "Nick" Clifford
We visit the gift shop before we leave and get to chat with Donald “Nick” Clifford, a charming gentleman who had been one of the workers on the monument during the last three years of the project in 1939-42. He’s there greeting visitors and signing copies of a book describing the construction. It’s a real treat to meet and shake hands with him, there can’t be many of his colleagues still surviving. We asked him to sign our book but neglected to get his photo – this one’s from the web.
He and his wife donated a plaque in the early ‘90s listing the names of all those who worked on the project.
The project generated lots of jobs...
We’re back on the road heading south, passing through the Black Hills, Custer and near the monumental sculpture of Chief Crazy Horse, begun in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski, who had assisted Borglum on Mt. Rushmore a decade earlier. It’s slow work, being continued by Ziolkowski’s family since his death in 1982
Crazy Horse now...the inset is waht it will look like finished.
We continue south through Hot Springs and into Nebraska. Nebraska looks like this:
Are we there yet?
We stop for gas in the town of Crawford, it turns out to have a nice city park complete with welcome shade to have our picnic lunch. Signs telling us that swimming in the creek is forbidden are a bit puzzling, since it would be impossible to do much more than wet our feet in it. Perhaps it’s more imposing in spring.
As we leave Crawford we admire a remarkable lawn ornament in front of a house on Main Street…
We need one of these for Lake Vermilion.
…then head west into Wyoming to catch I-25 southbound into Colorado, where we’re able to travel a bit faster than we did through the Nebraska grasslands.
The miles roll by and we finally find our way to Louisville and Robin Pittendrigh’s lovely home. While I was a graduate student at Stanford, Robin’s dad Colin was recruited from Princeton University and I became friendly with him and his wife Mikey. I also got to know Robin and her brother Sandy when they came to visit California. Robin is a gifted artist and she recently retired as an art teacher at the Louisville high school. We’re really glad to see her and her son Nick again, and meet her dog, Snowy.
Robin and Snowy.
And we don’t have to drive again for a few days!