I planned to stay in Rapid City for a second night to take in some of the local attractions. There was rain in the forecast, but that didn't materialize, although it was cloudy all day with temps in the high 60's.
I headed west on US16 about 35 miles to the Crazy Horse Memorial located between Hill City and Custer, SD. The Memorial has been under construction since 1948 and is expected to take another 25-30 years to complete. Surprisingly, and I had forgotten this, the memorial is financed entirely through donations. The project was initiated in 1939 when Henry Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota Sioux Indian leader, contacted Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on the Mt. Rushmore sculpture, to design and build a monument to the Lakota Chieftain Crazy Horse, who had fought against General Custer at the Little Bighorn. The project has been underway ever since and is being managed by Ziolkoswki's wife and 7 of his 9 living children. Pat and I had been here 30-odd years ago and the complex has grown considerably since then. There is a beautiful visitor's center (which accepts donations) and at the visitor's center is the actual preliminary scale-model of what the finished sculpture will look like:
You can get a sense of the size of the actual monument from this picture:
I took a short bus ride to the base of the mountain, and from this picture below, of Crazy Horse's face, you can get some idea of how huge the sculpture is:
The structure on top of his head is essentially a giant protractor that is used to transfer measurements from the scale models to the sculpture itself to guide the work crews in carving the monument. Most of the "carving" is actually done by blasting. Anyway, the monument was worth the $8 admission fee and was very interesting.
Since it was a bit chilly, I headed down the road to the town of Custer. The town was the site of an encampment by Custer's 7th Calvary in 1874 and was the site where gold was first discovered in the Black Hills. Anyway, nice, quaint, touristy little town. I thought this captured the spirit of the place best:
I guess if you don't, Wyatt Earp'll make you "dance."
I left Custer and headed over to Mt. Rushmore, about 25 miles away. Again, Pat and I had been here about 30 years ago, and it is still impressive. There have been a lot of improvements in the Visitor's Center and they had a very interesting film about the carving of the monument. I thought this was a good shot of the monument. The flags are on a walkway leading to the VC and there is one flag for each state:
Inside the Visitor's Center, they had an interesting collection of artifacts from the construction of the monument. In the first picture below, you can see one of the winches they used to lower workmen over the side of the mountain to carve the figures and,in the upper portion of the picture, one of the "bosun's chairs" that the men sat in while they worked:
And in the second picture below is a photograph of part of the stairs that the men used to get up and down the mountain:
The Park is very well done and very informative and worth the visit if you haven't been there before.
After Mt. Rushmore, I headed back to Rapid City to Ellsworth Air Force Base where they have the South Dakota Air and Space Museum. Ellsworth had been a bomber crew training base during WWII and later, during the Cold War, was a major SAC strategic bomber base. The museum had examples of most of the types of planes that had been positioned there over the time since the base was build in 1942. They have a B-29 (the plane the dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), a B-52 (still in service after almost 60 years), a B-1 bomber, and a number of other aircraft. Two exhibits I thought were particularly interesting were a B-25 that had been modified for Eisenhower's use during WWII:
And the second one was a Nike-Ajax anti-aircraft missile from the 1950's. The Nike was the first-ever anti-aircraft missile system, although it was unguided. What's is interesting to me about this is that one of my uncles was a Major in the Army during the 1950's and commanded a Nike battery near Norfolk, VA for at least a couple years. I remember him taking my family on a tour of the base and the missile installations. This is what the missile looked like:
So, a very enjoyable day in the Rapid City area. The city has about 70,000 residents and seems to be pretty nice.
Tomorrow, it's east on State Route 44 through the Badlands and then east on I-90 to Worthington, Minnesota for the night.
Miles today: 126. Total: 5,594.
