500 Miles
Well, not quite. But we've logged quite a few.
Saturday: Got to the hotel and fell over. Had a quiet dinner in the hotel restaurant and recovered from jetlag. The Alex Johnson Hotel has an impressive history - lots of presidents and hollywood actors have stayed here, and the staff is friendly to a fault. We found ourselves overwhelmed with good advice.
Sunday: Went to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument. The roads were - mostly - empty. the summer season has departed, and with it the hordes of camera-clicking tourists that the Black Hills thrives on, so except at the monuments themselves we were pretty much alone on the road. Rushmore was very impressive, and we cheerfully walked the viewing loop (748 steps! 0_0) and gorged ourselves on interesting little factoids about the sculptors and the ambitions of the original project, which were, alas, cut rather short - Impressive as Rushmore is, it is but a rough sketch compared to the monument the sculptor originally envisioned. I found this sad - Rushmore stands as a monument of overarching ambition, but the inscriptions and halls of records that were meant to stand with them will never be realized. they remain a dream.
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, is a dream in full throttle - it may never be finished, and the original sculptor has gone, but his wife and children continue the project with the zeal of prophets in full cry. Crazy Horse Monument is colossal - dwarfing even its predecessor: the four heads of Mount Rushmore would be lost in the wind streaming back from Crazy Horses hair. They mean to carve the entire mountain. It may well take a century or more. I find myself hoping that they do not tire of the project and 'settle', as Rushmore's sculptors did, for less than the original vision. The Crazy Horse monument wants to include a university and a medical center for the Lakota people in their design, something that raises my deep-buried urge to teach.
After Crazy horse, we went in search of buffalo. The Bison herd of Custer National Park wanders where it will, and we never saw the entire herd - just one or two lone bison, grazing quietly at the far end of grassy valleys. (Mum and Gran'mama were total wusses, and refused to entertain my cheerful suggestions of 'shortcuts' to try and see more bison in the interior of the park.) We kept to the wildlife loop, and actually saw a fair bit of wildlife - Pronghorn antelope, gaggles of wild turkey, mule deer and white-tailed deer, and a colossal prairie dog town. Wild burros kicked up their heels for us, and begged the car in front of us for food by sticking their noses into the windows. We declined the opportunity of burro noses, and headed back north to catch the evening lighting ceremony at Rushmore, a quite impressive foofahrah of patriotic vigor. Mum and Grandmama sang along and sniffled into their hankies at appropriate moments, and I listened appreciatively, though I personally found the emotive stirring a tad too obvious to affect me. Then we at last stumbled back to the hotel and slept like the dead.
Monday: Devil's Tower and Deadwood. Despite Mum and my feeling of urgency to be out and off, we didn't get out onto the road until nearly eleven, a frustrating venture. The weather was overcast and threatening rain or thunder later, and Mum and I decided to shoot north along the main interchange, bypassing the 'scenic' smaller highways and run straight to Devil's Tower, then trundle back through Deadwood and back to town at a more leisurely rate.
Devil's Tower was about a two-hour drive out of South Dakota's Black Hills and into the red butte country that has made Wyoming famous in ils and pastels. I'm not really a landscape person, but I could easily see spending a summer here just painting. The colors! especially duiring the rainy season, when the red earth peeks through the gauzy veils of green and gold grasses, and practically sings to the eye. About an hourannahaff into the drive, we started to hunt the horizon for Devil's Tower, and finally saw it! from faraway, it looked like a crooked skyscraper, or a colossal spaceship set down on earth. the movies do not do it justice. Even thirty miles out, it dominates the landscape. We watched it get bigger and bigger while gran'mama gleefully read the legends associated with it from the sheet we'd gotten at the hotel. I pointed out to Mum, when we were finally sitting under its enormity at the park (two climbers were ascending the shadow side of the Tower, looking for all the world like two ladybugs on a redwood stump) that if the Tower's igneous mass had erupted underwater, we'd have a second Ponape - the basalt columns that make up both geologic anomalies are created the same way. Devil's Tower is nearly 900 feet off the desert floor, and a good 3000 feet above sea level, this being the high plains - but I don't know how high Ponape's formation rises above the sea floor. For aught i know, Ponape may be higher.
After Devil's Tower, Deadwood was a bit of a letdown. we were too saddle-sore to do much more than grab a spot of lunch and hit the visitor's center. In hindsight, we probably would've enjoyed Deadwood more if we'd done it first. But the little museum there had a pencil sketch of Wild Bill Hickock done by N.C. Wyeth, and some very interesting artifacts (and just plain facts) about the town's history. Among other things, Deadwood had a thriving Chinatown. I would never have guessed it. Anyway, we were pooped, so we packed ourselves back to town and spent the evening relaxing.
Today we're going to take it easy and hit the museums inside Rapid City - there's a dinosaur park on a nearby hill, with a life-sized Brontosaur who has been overlooking our hotel benevolently since we got here. We're going to find him and give him a good belly-rub.
I'll have more to report later. Got to go, since Mum and Gran'mama have finished breakfast. Have fun, wherever you may be today!
Saturday: Got to the hotel and fell over. Had a quiet dinner in the hotel restaurant and recovered from jetlag. The Alex Johnson Hotel has an impressive history - lots of presidents and hollywood actors have stayed here, and the staff is friendly to a fault. We found ourselves overwhelmed with good advice.
Sunday: Went to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument. The roads were - mostly - empty. the summer season has departed, and with it the hordes of camera-clicking tourists that the Black Hills thrives on, so except at the monuments themselves we were pretty much alone on the road. Rushmore was very impressive, and we cheerfully walked the viewing loop (748 steps! 0_0) and gorged ourselves on interesting little factoids about the sculptors and the ambitions of the original project, which were, alas, cut rather short - Impressive as Rushmore is, it is but a rough sketch compared to the monument the sculptor originally envisioned. I found this sad - Rushmore stands as a monument of overarching ambition, but the inscriptions and halls of records that were meant to stand with them will never be realized. they remain a dream.
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, is a dream in full throttle - it may never be finished, and the original sculptor has gone, but his wife and children continue the project with the zeal of prophets in full cry. Crazy Horse Monument is colossal - dwarfing even its predecessor: the four heads of Mount Rushmore would be lost in the wind streaming back from Crazy Horses hair. They mean to carve the entire mountain. It may well take a century or more. I find myself hoping that they do not tire of the project and 'settle', as Rushmore's sculptors did, for less than the original vision. The Crazy Horse monument wants to include a university and a medical center for the Lakota people in their design, something that raises my deep-buried urge to teach.
After Crazy horse, we went in search of buffalo. The Bison herd of Custer National Park wanders where it will, and we never saw the entire herd - just one or two lone bison, grazing quietly at the far end of grassy valleys. (Mum and Gran'mama were total wusses, and refused to entertain my cheerful suggestions of 'shortcuts' to try and see more bison in the interior of the park.) We kept to the wildlife loop, and actually saw a fair bit of wildlife - Pronghorn antelope, gaggles of wild turkey, mule deer and white-tailed deer, and a colossal prairie dog town. Wild burros kicked up their heels for us, and begged the car in front of us for food by sticking their noses into the windows. We declined the opportunity of burro noses, and headed back north to catch the evening lighting ceremony at Rushmore, a quite impressive foofahrah of patriotic vigor. Mum and Grandmama sang along and sniffled into their hankies at appropriate moments, and I listened appreciatively, though I personally found the emotive stirring a tad too obvious to affect me. Then we at last stumbled back to the hotel and slept like the dead.
Monday: Devil's Tower and Deadwood. Despite Mum and my feeling of urgency to be out and off, we didn't get out onto the road until nearly eleven, a frustrating venture. The weather was overcast and threatening rain or thunder later, and Mum and I decided to shoot north along the main interchange, bypassing the 'scenic' smaller highways and run straight to Devil's Tower, then trundle back through Deadwood and back to town at a more leisurely rate.
Devil's Tower was about a two-hour drive out of South Dakota's Black Hills and into the red butte country that has made Wyoming famous in ils and pastels. I'm not really a landscape person, but I could easily see spending a summer here just painting. The colors! especially duiring the rainy season, when the red earth peeks through the gauzy veils of green and gold grasses, and practically sings to the eye. About an hourannahaff into the drive, we started to hunt the horizon for Devil's Tower, and finally saw it! from faraway, it looked like a crooked skyscraper, or a colossal spaceship set down on earth. the movies do not do it justice. Even thirty miles out, it dominates the landscape. We watched it get bigger and bigger while gran'mama gleefully read the legends associated with it from the sheet we'd gotten at the hotel. I pointed out to Mum, when we were finally sitting under its enormity at the park (two climbers were ascending the shadow side of the Tower, looking for all the world like two ladybugs on a redwood stump) that if the Tower's igneous mass had erupted underwater, we'd have a second Ponape - the basalt columns that make up both geologic anomalies are created the same way. Devil's Tower is nearly 900 feet off the desert floor, and a good 3000 feet above sea level, this being the high plains - but I don't know how high Ponape's formation rises above the sea floor. For aught i know, Ponape may be higher.
After Devil's Tower, Deadwood was a bit of a letdown. we were too saddle-sore to do much more than grab a spot of lunch and hit the visitor's center. In hindsight, we probably would've enjoyed Deadwood more if we'd done it first. But the little museum there had a pencil sketch of Wild Bill Hickock done by N.C. Wyeth, and some very interesting artifacts (and just plain facts) about the town's history. Among other things, Deadwood had a thriving Chinatown. I would never have guessed it. Anyway, we were pooped, so we packed ourselves back to town and spent the evening relaxing.
Today we're going to take it easy and hit the museums inside Rapid City - there's a dinosaur park on a nearby hill, with a life-sized Brontosaur who has been overlooking our hotel benevolently since we got here. We're going to find him and give him a good belly-rub.
I'll have more to report later. Got to go, since Mum and Gran'mama have finished breakfast. Have fun, wherever you may be today!