Mount Rushmore and Devil's Tower 24 & 25 Sept

We had set our alarms for 7am to be up and at Rushmore in the morning light. What a treat, it was nearly empty and the Presidents stared down over us. It's difficult to imagine (until you are there) just how enormous they are; for example, Washington's nose is 21 foot long; and that in fact the sculpture is not finished (nor do they intend to do so), as all work ceased in 1946 when Borglum (the sculptor) died. It was intended to continue down to the waist of Washington and Lincoln, the shoulders of Jefferson, but Roosevelt was going to always be 'just' a head. A half mile walk around the base of the rocks had notices with basic facts about each of the presidents. Did you know that neither Washington nor Lincoln had any formal education at all? There were also fantastic old photos of the workers who hung precariously over the side of the cliff face to do the carving. 450,000 tons of rock were removed, 90% by dynamite, the rest by electric drills run by pneumatic generators at the foot of the rock. At one stage during construction they called in an engineer to find out why they were losing power; it turned out that the smithy had cut some holes in the pneumatic pipes to blow air over him as he worked, so they gave him a fan! And also, that on Mondays, most of the women in Keystone did their laundry and their was a huge surge in electricity use, so they brought in a generator to make up the shortfall on washday! Did you know that behind the heads their is a huge vault cut into the rock into which have been sealed a sort of time capsule about the 20th century with information of the state of affairs in the world and also a record of how the carvings were made? Whilst we were there 2 wild mountain goats came trotting casually down the rocks to eat some of the tended grass around the monument (one also bleated rather a lot!), as goats are one of Celso's favourites you will find a large gallery of pictures of the pair!
After about an hour and a half at the site we wend our way amongst the magnificent hills again (with a brief 40 minute stop at a lake for Celso to throw in a line (one bite, no catches)), to make our way to the Crazy Horse monument which is a new statue being carved into the rocks of the Black Hills about 20 miles from Rushmore. This is a work in progress with only the head completed so far in any detail, the arm and hair are there in outline. It will be a statue of Crazy Horse on a horse at full gallop with his hair streaming out behind him. The four faces at Rushmore would fit into Crazy Horse's hair, it's going to be enormous, but they reckon it will be finished in 35 years or so! We simply did a drive by as it turned out they were asking for more than we were willing to pay to park and take a good look, maybe we'll come back and pay $27 in 20 years or so!
And so we made our way North through more fabulous scenery to Spearfish Canyon where we stopped to take a short walk along the edge of a beautifully clear mountain stream / river and also to wonder at a beautiful waterfall that seemed to appear out of nowhere up above us. After this the hills got smaller but no less glorious, slowly rolling back into grassland but with red sandstone mounds that appeared to have been smoothed off at the top with a knife (they were all so flat and all so exactly the same height at the top), perhaps the work of a glacier.. I don't know. And then suddenly the great lump of rock called Devil's Tower appeared and got larger and larger as we neared. Now we are camped at its base (in Wyoming, another state to add to our tally). The story goes that there were 8 Indian children of a chief all playing, 7 girls and one boy. The boy suddenly was struck dumb; he started to grow claws and fur and turned into a bear. His sisters were terrified as he began to chase them. The stump of an old tree told the girls to climb onto it and it rose up into the sky as the bear clawed frantically at its base. The girls became the 7 stars in the Big Dipper (plough) and the scratch marks from the bear can still be seen on the tree stump that turned to stone.
The Western version is that there was an extrusion of magma up towards the surface of the land through the sandstone that solidified and cracked into columns as it cooled; the surrounding sandstone was then eroded away over millions of years leaving this tower of rock.
We are sitting in the sun at its base drinking tea and eating hot croissants, marvelling at its enormity and gearing ourselves up for a three mile hike around its base. (Of course we have no Internet connection here so I am writing this in Word to be cut and pasted next time we have a chance; so much happens that if we don't get this written each day we lose the details. We can't believe that we have been in the van 3 weeks now.... so much done, time going too fast.)
Our hike around the tower was amazing, and hot, and tiring, and exhilarating. From the base it is 264m high and it just appears to go up vertically out of the surrounding hill, its top has the area of a football field. Fantastic views from the base back over the plains, the 6 or 7 sided columns of igneous rock that have broken off the tower are scattered amongst the trees at its base. We have far too many pictures of it but on our little computer we can't decide which ones to keep and which to discard (you probably won't believe it but today's haul of photos was 260 and we managed to get that down to 140!) On both the way up and the way down we passed through a prairie dog town and we have yet more cute photos.
A bit hot and sweaty we set of westwards again across endless plains of dried grasses, lots of cattle and herds of deer (especially where the grasses had been watered) and have made it to Buffalo in the centre of Wyoming at the foot of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area that we will tackle tomorrow to take us over near to The Grand Tetons and Yellowstone.