54

Today is my 54th birthday. As I do every year on this day (and hopefully will continue to do for a while longer) I give thanks to have made it through another year. There's no question that this pandemic that seemingly won't ever go away has once again affected my travel over the last year, although the two shots of vaccine I received before birthday number 53 and the two boosters after those first two has made getting out of town this year way less stressful. As far as we know, we've been untouched personally by COVID. We know we are more fortunate than others in that regard. I also appreciate the United States recently scrapping the testing requirement to come home from abroad recently.

Year 54 was a relatively busy travel year. I can count 10 trips that we've completed in the past 12 months. That's an incredible number. We hit Maine, Philadelphia, a mini-Midwest swing from Milwaukee to Chicago, Richmond, Portugal, the Hudson Valley, New Mexico, New York City, Southern California and a Memorial Day weekend visit to South Dakota and Nebraska. But most of those trips were four nights or fewer in duration and the three that exceed that number were for five, eight and eight nights. We went a lot of places, but we didn't stay long when we went. 

That got us a lot of coverage, but I lacked a wanderlust type trip this past year. The last amazing trip for me remains our October 2020 trip to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We have to change that soon. We have to get ourselves immersed in a completely incredible environment sometime this year. Maybe even more than once.

You might have noticed Portugal on my trip list over the last year. Yes, we made it out of the country, the first time I've done so since January of 2020 when we went to the Bahamas. It was great to dip a toe again into international travel and go back to Portugal for the first time in over 40 years (!!!). We actually had a second overseas trip in December planned to Vienna, Austria before the Omicron variant shut that city and its Christmas markets down for the season. Maybe this year...

We came across ex-muffler man Big Josh on our way out to Joshua Tree National Park.

So what did I love this year? So, so much. There were genuinely amazing days that I will hopefully remember for the rest of my life. Puffin watching in Maine. Exploring an icon of modern architecture near Chicago before hitting a blues club. Hanging out on a farm learning about how cork is harvested. Exploring Porto for too few hours. Spending a whole week just before Christmas in my spiritual homeland of New Mexico. Finally visiting Joshua Tree National Park. Rapid City, South Dakota. I get the last one is like a complete non sequitur but that place is seriously amazing.

It also seemed like we had a number of iconic food moments this past year. Maine lobster rolls. Pastéis and grilled sardines in Lisbon. Biscochitos in Albuquerque. Port in Porto (yes, Port counts as food here!). Sausages in Milwaukee. In-N-Out Burger. And a special shout out to the tuna crudo at Eventide Oyster Co. in Portland, ME; the shakshuka at Los Poblanos Inn in New Mexico; and everything we ordered at Rooster and the Pig in Palm Springs. Food is really important when we travel. We've been really, really lucky this year. If you are ever in Palm Springs, I would definitely encourage you to visit Rooster and the Pig. Just incredible food. 

Of course, I can't close my annual birthday post without a goals check for this five year period. As of a year ago, I had just two goals left before I turned 55: complete my quest to visit all 50 states and make it to Angkor Wat. I made progress this year, but admittedly not a whole lot. No trip to Cambodia yet but I did move my states visited total from 47 to 48 by spending a few hours in Nebraska. Just Kansas and Oklahoma to go there. The good news is they are next to each other. The bad news is I have no trip planned to either state. Or Cambodia for that matter. I'm down to my last year. 

So what does year 55 hold? Well I guess it better hold a trip to the American Midwest and to a certain ancient Hindu temple in southeast Asia or I'll have to admit some failure on my goals. Maybe I'll be forced to take the COVID mulligan. I'd rather not. Hopefully we can make it on our Austria trip that was cancelled last December and the cover picture of this post (where I'm usually holding a beer) might give some insight to another of our trips. Other than that? Just rolling with the travel restrictions as they are lifted and applied. We are no longer planning a year ahead of time at this point. Too much past disappointment. 

There's no doubt that there's a lot of uncertainty out there when it comes to where we can go. Hopefully this year comes closer to what we've experienced before 2020. Onward! I can't wait to see what this year brings. 

Found this polvo (octopus) on the side of a building in Porto.

Devils Tower

There is an old Kiowa legend about seven little girls, some bears and a giant rock that grew from the Earth. Seems the girls were playing at a good distance from their camp one day when they came across a group of bears, and the bears (being bears) gave chase, presumably seeing the girls run and thinking they were prey.

In case you didn't know, you are not supposed to run from bears.

Now it may come as no surprise to you but bears can run faster than little girls. And seeing their pursuers gaining, the girls climbed onto a low rock and prayed to the rock to save them. It did (these sorts of things tend to happen in legends). The rock started growing right as the girls stood upon it and raised them high above the Earth and saved them from the bears, with the animals clawing and scratching uselessly as the rock rose from the ground.

The girls never went home. Their families looked for them and found only broken bear claws turned to stone where the rock had grown and bore them out of danger. The bears never got to the girls either. Instead of going home or being eaten, the girls fled to the night sky. They can still be seen today in what we now call the Pleiades, seven stars that make up part of the constellation of Taurus. 

The rock that saved them is still out there too, complete with deep vertical claw marks made by those bears all those years ago. The rock today is known as Devils Tower and it sits on about the most northern part of the United States that the Kiowa ever lived. Today it's in Wyoming, and within easy driving distance of Rapid City, SD, where we made camp for the Memorial Day weekend this year. I'm not spending a long weekend in Rapid City and not driving 90 miles or so to go see Devils Tower.

You think that story is farfetched? Maybe. Maybe that's why it's a legend. But do you know it's not true? You never know what actually happened in the past. 

Truth be told, I've had Devils Tower on my list for years. I considered it as a stop on my cross-country drive in 2011 that on some level was the origin of this blog. But in that year, it was either Devils Tower or the Battle of Little Bighorn. We opted for the Little Bighorn to pick up Montana and see the spot where George Armstrong Custer (one of my most reviled historical figures) met his end. Devils Tower would have to wait. It's been worked into various trip itineraries since that year but it was just too far away to hit on our Yellowstone 2020 trip (Wyoming is a big state). As I've already stated, no way could I be in Rapid City for four days and not drive to Devils Tower.

It may come as no surprise for you to learn that scientists today have another explanation for the Tower's formation other than the prayers of some little girls. It may also come as no surprise for you to learn that volcanic action may have been involved. While there is some debate about the exact cause, the data suggests that the Tower's volume was established by some underground (at that time) volcanic eruption that caused a mass of rock to form within and below a softer layer of the Earth's surface. Over the centuries and millennia, the soft stuff eroded away and eventually got to such a level where the Tower became visible.

I know what you are thinking...how do the scientists explain the giant bear claw marks along the shaft of the Tower? Good question. Apparently when the mass of volcanic rock cooled, it contracted and started to fracture. The fracture lines were remarkably geometric, cracking the cooling lava into a series of hexagonal shaped mini-shafts, sort of like a stack of giant pencils grouped together. The bear claws at the base of the Tower are pieces of these giant pencils that have snapped off over the millions of years that the Tower has been visible.

Some of the "bears' claws" that fell off the Tower over the centuries. See below for a scale figure.

This is not, by the way, the first time we've encountered a geological phenomenon like this. There is a part of Yellowstone National Park that has a formation like this and we walked all over a series of hexagonal-shaped rock stones at Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland in 2019. The stones at Giant's Causeway were maybe two feet or a bit less to a side. Devil's Tower's hexagons are a bit bigger. OK...so a lot bigger. We'll get to that.

As a National Park property (Devils Tower was the first National Monument in 1906 and is still in that status), the focus for us was all on the Tower. There's no practical way to climb this thing without some pretty advanced climbing equipment and presumably some training, so we were left to walk around and near the Monument itself. There is an awesome, 1.3 mile long paved trail (the Tower Trail, if you must know) that comprehensively and uncomplicatingly (yes, I made that word up) leads you around the entirety of the Tower. It's not too steep and it's well shaded. There are longer trails at the park itself but this one seemed perfect for us.

The trail takes you through a Ponderosa pine forest which is just incredible. The way the path winds through the forest gives you an ever-changing view of the Tower itself while also at spots giving you amazing vistas over the forest and plains around the park. There's nothing fancy here. It's a walk around a giant rock, but the rock is a pretty amazing one and there are definitely notable stops along the way.

Some of these rocks around the Tower are pretty sizeable.

Perhaps one of the more astonishing places to stop is a side trail that points you to some old wooden ladders towards the top of the Tower. We were not actually able to spot the ladders from the ground through the custom built viewing tubes (for lack of a better word) due to poor eyesight (seriously, we just couldn't see...come try my glasses on sometime if you doubt me) but apparently climbing Devils Tower was an actual thing at one time. Like for actual regular people who needed no greater qualifications that climbing a ladder.

We did, by the way, see some 21st century people climbing Devils Tower. I've had notions at times (like maybe a decade or so ago) about climbing a mountain. Looking into what it would take to climb Mount Rainier before deciding it was likely too much for me was about as far as I took this idea. But there is no way I'd do what these people on the side of Devils Tower were doing. There is seemingly no way up the rock faces of that Tower and these people are out there with some ropes and some helmets. I'm sure it's less complicated than my worst fears but it's not for me. No way. I've walked to Machu Picchu and felt incredible about it, but climbing Devils Tower ain't my thing. Not ever.

The figures in the photograph below do, if nothing else, show the size of the hexagonal extrusions that make up the Tower. These "pencils" are way bigger than the ones we walked over at Giant's Causeway.

Have you been reading this post wondering why it's called Devils Tower? We did when we arrived there and started driving through the actual park. Seems that if you are there at sunset the actual Tower sometimes seems to glow an orange color and I guess someone, somehow associated this glow with Satan. Why, I have no idea, but that's the reality of the name, I guess. It's because of the color.

Devils Tower as a place to visit is not complicated. But it certainly is impactful and I believe that there is great value in going to places like this so you can see for yourself what it's like there. This is, in fact, one of the cornerstones of my philosophy about travel itself. As much as you can read about places and see photographs or movies or videos and talk to other people who have been there, there is absolutely no substitute for actually being there yourself.

If you had asked me to relate the character of Devils Tower at this time last year, I likely would have described it as an orange-red rock in the middle of some barren deserted landscape. It's clearly not. I guess I could have learned some or all of that by studying pictures and reading descriptions online but there's nothing like going somewhere to really learn about somewhere. Devil's Tower is not orange-red; based on our visit it's green, flecked by lichen growing on the rocks. You can see the lichen on some of the fallen "bears' claws" scattered around the Tower.

The lichen on the rocks makes Devils Tower look green.

The land around Devils Tower is also anything but barren. That's maybe pretty obvious from the pictures added to this post. The Tower sits within the forest around it. The rock does not sit clear of the pines that cover the land on all sides. Instead it is viewed between the pines as you walk around it. It's also not on a flat plain; it's actually on a ridge in the land, so when you drive up to the Tower, you drive onto a plinth on which it sits.

The thing is also absolutely enormous. We first caught sight of the Tower when our navigation app read 17 miles to the Visitor Center and I suspect we could have seen it from a lot further away if the contours of the land we were driving on didn't obscure the Tower from view.

I'm not sure if I'm ever going to be back near Devils Tower again. This is likely my one and only visit. I can't imagine spending much more time in southwest South Dakota and southeast Wyoming in my life because it's just too remote and inconvenient to get to, and there are way, way more places above it on the list. I am, however, fairly sure that this won't be the last time I'll ever see these hexagonal rock formations in nature. After all, we still need to make the trip to the other end of the Giant's Causeway at some point in the future. 

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How We Did It

Devils Tower National Monument is open 24 hours per day every day of the year. Pretty simple opening hours there. We timed our visit to coincide with the opening of the Visitor Center at 9 a.m. and to beat the rush that we perceived might be hiking the Tower Trail. I don't think we needed to do either.

Sometimes Visitor Centers at National Parks add a ton of value. I felt this way pretty strongly about places like Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. I didn't feel that way about Devils Tower. I'm not saying skip it, but if you wanted to get there earlier than the Visitor Center opened, I don't think it would affect your experience there.

We also didn't think it was that crowded. Most of the time we spent on the Trail we found ourselves alone or a good distance from any other people. Sure, it was a weekday and was not yet Memorial Day (although it was the Friday before that holiday) but we were surprised by the lack of people at the site. 

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Carhenge

As of the beginning of last month, I had just three states left to visit to lay claim to having set foot in all 50 of our United States. Then we visited Nebraska. Now I have just two remaining. Kansas and Oklahoma, if you must know.

It is not enough for me to cross a state's border, get out of the car and declare myself having crossed one more state off the list. No!!! For me, I have to have done something or visited somewhere significant in my time there to truly claim that I have been there. This is sometimes difficult, especially when we get down to Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma on the "to visit" list. Not dissing those states exactly, but it's not like we are heading to New York or Los Angeles or somewhere like that.

Finding something meaningful to do becomes even more difficult when we aren't really visiting the state that we try to cross off the list, which is what happened with Nebraska. If we wanted to visit Nebraska to just get credit for having spent time in Nebraska, we probably would have flown to Omaha, downed a steak dinner and a Reuben sandwich (it was invented there) for lunch the next day and gone home. But we weren't visiting Nebraska; our trip last month was to South Dakota, but our itinerary would take us to within 45 miles of the northwest Nebraska border.

Come on...we had to make it to Nebraska. All we had to do was find something significant in the northwest corner of the state. And grabbing lunch at Runza would not count.

We settled on Carhenge. Yes, Carhenge.

The best car (in my opinion) at Carhenge. The 1954 or 1956 Cadillac used as a lintel atop two Ford wagons.

And second best...the 1950 Chrysler DeSoto.

There is something uniquely American about building a replica of Stonehenge out of cars in the middle of the United States. I know that makes relatively little sense but I don't think you could really get away with doing something this simultaneously pointless and awesome at the same time in any other country in the world. And the central part of our country seems to be peppered with these types of things. World's largest ball of twine. The Blue Whale of Catoosa. World's largest pistachio (there are a lot of "world's largest" out there...). Muffler men. Cadillac Ranch. They and many others like them of varying quality and interest are all part of the American road trip experience. Or something like that. When they work, they are amazing. 

Carhenge is the brainchild of Jim Reinders, an engineer from Alliance, Nebraska who spent seven years of his life working in England. When he returned home, somehow he decided he needed to create what he referred to as "Stonehenge West" and his medium of choice happened to be cars. 

Apparently Jim had a lot of cars lying around and I guess it's way easier to move cars to a field in rural Nebraska than it is to move giant slabs of stone. He started with 25 cars and managed to get all of them into place in a six-day long family reunion over the summer solstice in 1987. Can you imagine showing up to a weeklong gathering with family and finding out that someone's got an idea that you are going to be standing cars in the ground and placing others on top of them in an effort to personalize your cousin Jim's field? That must have been a fun week.

Keep in mind here that it's not just putting cars in place as is. All the windows are covered with sheet steel (I'm assuming it's steel...also assuming they were covered for safety reasons) and then the whole things are painted grey to match the actual stone circle on Salisbury Plain. I guess those things are a fairly light lift compared to the actual moving of the cars.

Random American cars topped by a 1975 Gremlin (left) and 1962 Plymouth Valiant (right).

1960 Ford Galaxie (left) and 1961 Cadillac DeVille (right) emerging from the ground.

Now, if you know anything about me and cars, you'll know I'm not much of a cars guy. But I do have a love for specific models and a certain era of automobile design from the 1950s to the 1970s. And Carhenge has a number of these. How Jim Reimers decided the best use of a 1950 Chrysler DeSoto or a mid-50s Cadillac was to blow out the windows, paint them solid grey and make them part of his backyard sculpture is beyond me. Of course, I don't have the benefit of knowing the condition of these vehicles before he moved them to his field and started stacking them on top of each other.

I do appreciate the fact that he seems to have kept the most interesting models for use as the lintels in the circle and used the more generic sedans and wagons to hold those more distinctive automobile bodies on full display. I'd love to have most of these cars in great condition in my driveway. Even the 1975 AMC Gremlin on the north side of the circle. Of course, I can't drive my own car that I'm in love with often enough these days to even put 500 miles on the odometer in a single year. Clearly my theoretical collection of classic cars would need a much bigger stable than my current garage and driveway setup.

And if you are being impressed with me spouting off years and models of cars painted all the same color, don't be. The gift store sells a map of the sculpture with all the cars identified.

Check out the tail fins on the 1957 Plymouth (I believe) on the right. Damn those things are gorgeous.

How I know what I know about cars at Carhenge.

It may seem crazy to you that I drove (...or more accurately sat in the passenger seat...I drove back) 2-1/2 hours to get to a field with a bunch of cars altered and painted and stuck in the ground in a circle. It is for sure a serious drive from Rapid City, but it got me a new state and it's free. I can legitimately claim I've now visited Nebraska and I didn't spend that much to get there. Just $4.50 or whatever it was that weekend per gallon of gas.

It also works. Somehow it makes sense. It's well enough done and doesn't look sloppy. I'd debate the precision of its similarity to the actual Stonehenge but I suppose precision is not really the point here. It really doesn't possess any of the presence or mystery of Stonehenge either, but you can at least walk around and between the henge and touch the cars, all of which you can't do at the real thing. It's all pretty much stupid, I know. But it's completely middle American and I love it. 

The gift shop is also awesome. In addition to the map of the place identifying all the cars, we will have a brand new Carhenge Christmas tree ornament hanging from a branch on our fake Christmas tree this December. How cool is that?

Lest you think a visit to Carhenge stops at the henge of cars, you'd be wrong. Seems Jim had a few more ideas up his sleeve for other ways to make cars into art and he's located these north of the circle in their own separate area of the property. There are a couple of time capsules up in that area along with a group of four cars called the "Fourd Seasons". There's also a "car"-nestoga wagon which perhaps obviously is a car modified to resemble a Conestoga wagon and a graffiti-tagged "auto"-graph car which adds color to the place.

None of these additions (there are also others not by Jim) has the impact or the scale or the inspiration of the original idea. None of them bests Carhenge.

Thus mostly ended our trip to Nebraska. Mostly. We got hungry and you know we just couldn't get out of the state without hitting a Runza. 

What's a Runza, you might ask? Well, it's a ground beef and cabbage sandwich that's supplemented with other ingredients depending on what variety you decide upon. I went with the southwest, which I'm not sure was the correct call. The sandwich was good but not great but I'd give it another shot if I ever found myself in rural Nebraska again. I'd probably pass on the frings (fries and onion rings combo) but the service in the Chadron, NE restaurant was fantastic. Best fast food service experience of my life. Jackson represented Nebraskans very well.

Carhenge and Runza. That's my Nebraska experience. I'd call it good enough.

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How We Did It

Carhenge is not a complicated place to visit. Just plug it in to your navigation app of choice and pull off into their parking lot. It's open dawn to dusk. The gift shop is only open late May to September but the hours when they are open are great: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. There's no admission charge for Carhenge but donations are appreciated. We made sure to buy plenty of swag in the gift shop. I mean when else are you going to get the chance?

The Chadron Runza is open daily 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. If I ever find myself back at a Runza, I think I'd go with the Cheeseburger Runza. Say hi to Jackson for us if you visit in Chadron.

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Stolen Land

I swore I wasn't going to visit South Dakota and come back and write a blog post about Mount Rushmore. I swore it! No way was I going to do that. Couldn't imagine any scenario where I'd be putting keyboard to screen to bang out a post about a glowing review of some huge sculpture of privileged, rich men carved into a mountain sacred to so many Native American peoples taken from them against their will. Wasn't going to do it. Especially since I'd already been there before. I was not discovering this thing for the first time on this trip.

I had a better idea. I was going to write about how the Black Hills was sacred land. I was going to write about how the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 promised the land to the Lakota in perpetuity. I was going to write about gold and Deadwood and the (new) Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 which took that land promised in perpetuity away forever. I was going to write about the Six Grandfathers and how Doane Robinson (the idea man) and Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor) desecrated the mountain. Finally I was going to write about Crazy Horse and how he was being memorialized like four presidents on Mount Rushmore. I was going to cover everything. All of it. And almost all of it was bad and wrong.

But then a couple of things happened. First, Deadwood is not the place I loved the last time I visited in 2011. It's a huge family tourist trap, a far cry from the small town caught between low table minimums and historic preservation that somehow maintained some sort of image as a dangerous frontier mining town that captured my imagination 11 years ago. And by "dangerous frontier mining town", I mean dangerous without the actual danger.

Second, the Crazy Horse Memorial seems to be getting nowhere on a campus that seems (to me) to be more about pulling in tourists than putting everything behind making the famous Lakota emerge from Thunderhead Mountain. I'm serious. The sculpture that is supposed to be carved out of the mountain is maybe 20 percent complete and it's been going since 1948. How many centuries is it going to take to get this thing complete? I know cathedrals in the middle ages took hundreds of years to complete, but I guess I feel that things should be quicker these days.

And third, the sculpture at Mount Rushmore is actually pretty skillfully executed. If you can ignore the whole stolen land thing. And we are not going to ignore that here. Or the KKK thing.

I could write for a long time about the history of crimes, including theft and murder, committed against the Lakota and other tribes in and around the Black Hills by Europeans who settled what is now the United States. I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to borrow from another source, for two reasons. First, I can't write more succinctly what I'm about to borrow. And second, I love it when trips that we take randomly reinforce immediate, future vacations. Which is exactly what happened in Los Angeles in late March.

On that trip, we visited the Academy Museum, a multi story downtown museum that outlines the history of motion pictures. One of the exhibits in the Museum is a single exhibit display about the history of painted backdrops. The backdrop on display just happens to be of Mount Rushmore. The description of the backdrop reads as follows.

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial has a controversial and painful history. It sits within the Paha Sapa, translated into English as the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people. The Lakota call it Wamaka Ogna Ke Icante (The Heart of Everything That Is). The land was reserved for the Lakota Sioux under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, an agreement the US government violated in 1877 following the discovery of gold.

In 1924, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was invited to create a monumental tourist attraction in the Black Hills. The site selected was Mount Rushmore, known to the Lakota as Thunk'sila S'akpe Paha, or the Six Grandfathers. Borglum began work in 1927 and died shortly before the monument's completion in 1941. 

For the Lakota community, the National Memorial desecrates their sacred land, an offense compounded by the fact that the Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt all participated in the oppression of America's Indigenous people.

Mount Rushmore has been an ongoing site of Indigenous American protest, most notably in 1970 and 1971. In 1980, the US Supreme Court awarded $105 million in compensation for the loss of the Black Hills. The Lakota rejected the money in favor of the return of the land - a demand that stands to the present day. 

Stolen land. Told you. I don't know how I sum up the history around Mount Rushmore any better than that with more words. It's pretty much as short and effective as it can be. 

Now is when I embarrass myself and go back on all that because I actually find something to admire at Mount Rushmore.

It is difficult for me to describe what it is that sucked me in and captured me at Mount Rushmore. It's not uber-patriotism or anything like that. I wasn't born here but I am proud to be a naturalized American while also understanding that this country has flaws like any other. I love this place but I don't fall for shows of nationalism that places like Mount Rushmore inspire in some people.

I am also not a huge fan of any of the presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore. I can get behind some to a lot of what Lincoln and Roosevelt did and believed in and I can appreciate the role George Washington and Thomas Jefferson played in founding this nation while also fundamentally disagreeing with a lot of Jefferson's ideals. When it comes to Jefferson vs. Alexander Hamilton, I'm team Hamilton all the way. Jefferson in my opinion did irreparable damage to this country that we still haven't gotten out from under. And no, I'm not going to cover that in this post.

And then there's the thought behind the idea. This thing was carved to give people something to visit in South Dakota. Plain and simple, it was conceived as a tourist attraction. Like that's necessary? There's so much amazing stuff to do and see in southwest South Dakota. Who needs four giant faces to get people to travel there? Certainly not me.

I think for me it comes down to presence and execution. I know that given the history of the land in question here, I should absolutely not be swayed by artistic merit and the way the trees frame the sculpture perfectly in some spots, but I am. 

It is difficult, after having visited places like Arches National Park and Zion National Park and having gazed with wonder on the Three Gossips and the Court of the Patriarchs, for me to state that the desecration of the six grandfathers by having some dude carve likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln into the side of the mountain actually improved the view. I don't know what it was like before they were there. I can look at pictures but can't really state what it was like because I wasn't there before they were carved. Nature makes some of the most gorgeous formations and views without any assistance from man.

All the time.

Having said that, the faces on Mount Rushmore are beautifully sited and they change dramatically (and fortunately to obscure Jefferson a lot) as you move around and in front of the mountain. There's some value in putting something recognizable as a point of reference to stare at and appreciate as the views of the thing shift with your position in the park around the National Monument. I don't like writing these words. Most of the siting of Mount Rushmore is unquestionably due to nature and not to the hand of man.

There is also real skill in both the carving of the mountain and the execution of the project itself. This whole thing took just a bit more than 14 years. That's staggering for a work of this size, type and location, although it was moved significantly along during the Great Depression when any job was a good job, no matter the danger. But you couldn't put just anyone on this project, right? I know it's a huge scale but ultimately, we are talking about art here, right? 

Before visiting South Dakota this time around, by the way, I guess I assumed that the carving here was executed by Gutzon Borglum alone. But there is a picture in The Rushmore Hotel in Rapid City (where we stayed) that shows the mountain covered with scaffolding and various people working on the sculpture. I have no idea what possessed me to think one man could execute this thing by himself. Just pointing out my error in case that wasn't obvious here. Still, 14 years for a work of this scale and skill is astounding. As an exercise in project management alone, it's impressive.

The skill required here really hits home when looking at the glasses of Teddy Roosevelt. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of amazing sculpture in the rest of the four faces, but the glasses do it for me. We are talking about portraying an essentially invisible accessory resting on a face. It's a frameless pince-nez, not a pair of thick rimmed glasses or anything like that. But it's totally believable that there are giant spectacles on the face of Theodore Roosevelt. I can't imagine that kind of detail is easy. If you assume Borglum wasn't personally executing that specific piece of the sculpture, it's even more impressive.

Mount Rushmore was about the third thing we did when we landed in South Dakota (lunch and the Crazy Horse Memorial preceded it). I drove out of there impressed but also determined to not write about this place in any context other than the history of the Black Hills in total.

Needles Highway changed my mind.

Needles Highway is a 14 mile long stretch of South Dakota Highway 87 leading out of Custer State Park north towards Rapid City (or at least that's what it did for us). It's a gorgeous drive that is going to take you a while and is worth every minute of it. It climbs and curves through a coniferous forest and shows off some of the amazing natural beauty of the Black Hills.

At four spots in the drive, the road cuts right through some giant boulders. I mean that literally. There are enormous solid rocks in the landscape that rather than remove or crush or dynamite these things out of the way, whoever made the decision to make this road just carved a hole wide enough for a single lane of traffic right through the rock. Each one is an incredible feat of engineering and it's impressive to be driving through a tunnel made just that way.

The last of the four (heading north) tunnels is named after Doane Robinson, the guy that came up with the idea of carving four president heads into mountain sacred to the original inhabitants of that land. To get your car aligned with the axis of the tunnel, you have to make a little bit of a left swing to take the right turn into it so (a) you don't risk scraping the sides of your vehicle getting through the thing and (b) you can see if there's anyone coming the other way. 

When you align your car with the Doane Robinson Tunnel, it frames Mount Rushmore perfectly. All you see through the opposite end of the tunnel is the four faces carved into the Six Grandfathers. It's an awesome framed view. Think about the effort and thought required to do that. It's almost unbelievable that someone could pull that off. Ignoring all the context of the bad stuff around this sculpture (and I actually believe I have covered most of that so far), that view made me write this post. For the complete Mount Rushmore experience, you should drive north on Needles Highway. This was a complete accident that we did this. It was an awesome surprise.

Ironically, the framed view through the Doane Robinson Tunnel was originally of the Six Grandfathers. The highway was completed in 1922, before Mount Rushmore was started. Presumably the tunnel was not originally named after Robinson, either.

The view of Mount Rushmore through the Doane Robinson Tunnel. And the view on the other side.

Before I end here, let's talk a little bit about sculptor Gutzon Borglum. I don't understand the thought process Borglum went through before taking this commission. Maybe he did it for the fame or the money. Maybe he felt it was the right and glorious thing to do. Maybe he didn't think or know anything about the site being sacred to Native Americans. Maybe he knew all about that last issue and took the job anyway. Heck, maybe he loved South Dakota so much that he wanted to create its greatest tourist attraction. I don't know what the motivation in him taking the commission was and I'm not going to spend any time figuring it out, although the next paragraph will offer some pretty damning information. Borglum's not really worth much of my effort but I do want to close this post by telling some truth about this guy.

This was not the first controversial job he engaged in. Before he spent 14 years at Mount Rushmore, he spent some time in Georgia, where he was hired as the sculptor for Stone Mountain, a rock which today is carved in bas relief showing the Confederates Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who rebelled against the United States to preserve slavery, or the right to own black people, in their states. If you want to engage in any sort of debate here about the reason for the United States Civil War, read my Richmond statues post first. Borglum was fired at Stone Mountain. Not out of any sort of moral principle (he was  a member of the Ku Klux Klan, after all) but due to financial disputes.

We didn't know all this about Borglum before we visited Mount Rushmore. I thought it was important to relate. It certainly colors my own appreciation of that work. It's disappointing that someone with ideas like that could make something so impactful. Maybe I should have refused to write anything complimentary about Borglum's achievements. I decided not to do that in the end.

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How We Did It

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is open daily starting at 5 a.m. It closes at 9 p.m. in the fall and winter and 11 p.m. in the spring and summer. Check their opening hours page for the exact dates of spring/summer and fall/winter. There is a $10 fee to park at the Memorial and the fee is non-negotiable. Not even the National Park Service Annual Pass gets you free parking at Mount Rushmore. There is no admission charge beyond the parking fee.

There are other things to do at Mount Rushmore other than walk around and gaze at the sculpture. Park Rangers conduct guided tours of Borglum's Studio and something called a Lakota, Nakota and Dakota Heritage Village. We got to Mount Rushmore at about 5 p.m. and found only the Memorial itself open. It should come as little surprise that that Heritage Village is only open for five non-continuous hours four days a week (but not weekends) for two and a half months of the year. As if the Native Americans needed that additional slap in the face here.

The sculpture is also illuminated nightly and there's some sort of ceremony in the summer months around the illumination. We got out of there before the lights were turned on.

If you want to get to the Doane Robinson Tunnel along Needles Highway, you'll have to do it in the summer months. The highway closes with the first snowfall of the season and doesn't re-open until April 1 or later. Trust me, it's worth it.

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Tatanka

What is it about even numbered years and bison lately? In 2018, we spent some time in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, saw a few bison and I wrote my first bison post on this blog. Two years later, we visited Yellowstone National Park, saw a ton of bison pretty much everywhere (including outside Yellowstone) and I wrote my second bison post on this blog. Now it's 2022 and we've just returned from a visit to the southwestern corner of South Dakota where there are (you know what's coming...) a whole lot of bison.

I called that first bison post in 2018 "Bison Bison" after the animals' genus and species and to emphasize that they are NOT buffalo. I added another "Bison" with my second post. I can't in all good conscience just add another "Bison" to the name of this blog post so I'm changing things up and going with "Tatanka", which is the Lakota (or Sioux, if they are an enemy to you) word for these animals. Here goes blog post number three about bison. This has to be the last one, if for no other reason than I don't know where exactly I'd go that I haven't already seen these creatures.

Although I guess there might be some in Nebraska.

Bison on the move in Badlands National Park.

I have documented the almost extinction of the bison on my two past posts on this same topic but a refresher is probably in order: when European settlers first arrived in North America and had an opportunity to see just how many bison there were out there in what is now the United States of America, they used estimates of 30 to 60 million of these animals. In 1889, the number was down to 1,091. North of 30 million to about a thousand in about 100 years or so. It was a staggering slaughter driven by greed, cruelty and a desire to cut off one of the essential natural resources available to Native American tribes. Kill the bison, kill the people who relied on them, or so went the thinking.

If we had visited South Dakota 200 years ago, we likely would have found vast herds of bison, thousands upon thousands of these animals with enough mass to make the Earth tremble when they started running. We would have also found a thriving Lakota culture whose very spiritual and literal existence would have revolved around the animals. Food, clothing, housing and tools would have all been missing without the bison.

Fifty or so years later, there would be no bison in South Dakota. Extinct in the 1870s.

Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills.

So considering their total extinction in the state in the nineteenth century, we knew our bison-watching experience in South Dakota was likely to be way different than in a place like Yellowstone National Park, which is one of the very few places on Earth where there is a herd descended from animals that roamed in the same spot hundreds of years ago. Not that we really care about lineage of bison or anything like that. We don't need purebred bison to enjoy watching these magnificent creatures. But the ones we hoped to find in South Dakota would have been deliberately placed there. They also would be roaming a far smaller parcel of land than Yellowstone National Park, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

For that last reason, we thought we'd stand the best chance of finding a significant number of bison by searching in a few places. Like a couple of National Parks and a State Park.

And yes, you read that last part correct, there is a State Park (Custer State Park, site of a memorable 2020 de-pantsing incident for a tourist who ignored the "don't approach bison" warning) in South Dakota with a herd of bison. This is not the first time we'd been in a such a place. There's one in Utah also (Antelope Island State Park) but Custer has a significantly larger bison presence, or at least it did when we visited. And they are not in pens or cages or anything like that. They are roaming free (although the whole place is fenced with cattle guards where roads cross the fence line). I'm completely jealous. I can't remember the last time I went to a Virginia State Park, probably because there are none nearby (or anywhere for that matter) that have their own herd of bison. I'd be there all the time if I lived in southwest South Dakota. 

Custer State Park. The horns on the first bison are particularly impressive.

So what were we up against, here? Well, Wind Cave National Park has between 250 and 400 bison; Badlands National Park has about 1,200 or so; and Custer State Park boasts 1,000 to 1,600 at any one time. All of the Parks (not just Custer State Park) are fenced to keep the animals in a relatively small location. At Custer, the herd is managed to right-size it to its location. There are no predators large enough to take down a bison in the Park so to prevent over-grazing, some members of the herd are auctioned off every year. You might think fencing and herd-managing equates to a zoo. I can see you thinking that way; we didn't. These are still free-roaming wild animals who survive out on their own. It may not have quite been Yellowstone, but this counted for us.

And as we found out, just showing up and paying admission didn't guarantee a bison sighting. We worked for the photos that I'm posting on here. We also didn't want to find ones and twos of bison like we found four years ago in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We really wanted to find a sizeable herd with some baby bison, considering our visit coincided pretty well with the mid-point of calving season. Who doesn't love baby bison?

Close-up. Wind Cave National Park.

We started our bison hunt last month in Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. The two Parks share a common boundary so driving from one to the next was extremely convenient. Both Parks are located in the Black Hills, a coniferous forest with intermittent meadows and open landscapes which in theory would make bison-spotting much more difficult than somewhere with a more open landscape. The Hills are also sacred to the Lakota and several other Native American tribes, but that's another story for another time.

Perhaps it's obvious from the pictures posted so far here but we did succeed in seeing bison at both Wind Cave and Custer. At Wind Cave, we covered the main Park drive down Highway 87 both north to south and south to north along with traveling on the gravel / dirt road called Highland Ridge Road or Route 5. That latter road is not super easy in a Toyota Camry and considering we got a good look at about three bison on the entire road (although that did include the close-up above), we probably could have skipped it and not missed out on anything. Although we had no way of knowing that ahead of time.

Highway 87 is a gorgeous winding road that takes you from prairie to forest and back to prairie with some incredible one way bridges. But the only place we saw bison on that road was at the north end on outside of the forest. And there were not that many bison along that road either. More than the gravel / dirt road but not a spectacular number. Wind Cave had the fewest bison of the three parks so perhaps that's not surprising.

Our time in Custer State Park was remarkably similar to Wind Cave. Custer has a larger herd and a brand new (...like literally brand new as of May 2022) Bison Center in the Park but we saw no more bison on our drive along the Wildlife Loop Road than we did in Wind Cave. One of the first things I do when I get back from any trip is to organize my photos and flag my favorites. Of all the bison pictures we took in South Dakota, only one Custer photo made the cut. That's not to say our experience was worse at Custer State Park than Wind Cave, but we certainly emerged with fewer keeper pictures there than we did earlier in the day. 

Last two pictures from Wind Cave. 

I'm also not saying our day searching for bison in the Black Hills wasn't worth it. It totally was. I'd definitely put it ahead of our experience in North Dakota four years ago, but we also definitely didn't get what we hoped to find. And yes, I've been on enough wildlife trips to know not to have high expectations. Our hopes for the herd and the baby bison were now pinned squarely on Badlands National Park.

2022 was not my first time at Badlands National Park. I stopped there for maybe 30 or 45 minutes on my way from Kansas City to Deadwood in 2011. We drove maybe a third of the Badlands Loop Road (the main road connecting the two primary entrances to the Park) on that visit and saw the amazing landscape characteristic of the Dakota badlands, but certainly nothing resembling any sort of sizeable wildlife. Or any wildlife at all, really. I would not have placed high hopes of Badlands salvaging my bison experience 11 years later based on that trip in 2011. This seemed risky.

It wasn't. Badlands National Park was the best thing we did in our four days in South Dakota. Hands down. We had some amazing experiences on other days. In fact, pretty much everything we did in the four days we were out doing things in South Dakota was really memorable, which is a little shocking to write. But Badlands was the best.

Two bison pictures from Badlands National Park.

We planned Badlands. We charted out a route that had us entering in the middle of the Park fairly early in the day; hoping for some bighorn sheep at Pinnacles Overlook; heading east down Badlands Loop Road; circling back through Wall (and Wall Drug!); re-entering in the middle of the Park; and finally heading west along the gravel Sage Creek Rim Road where, according to the Park's website, we were most likely to see bison.

In what turned out to be a really good omen, we found three bachelor bison before we even entered the Park. We got lucky with the bighorns shortly after that. 14 total, including one lamb, set against the gorgeous eroded landscape of the badlands that looks like some giant had taken a giant plow to the Earth and then just left the ground that way and walked away, leaving it cut and scarred as a series of valleys between sand and orange-ish colored mounds. The Badlands Loop Road winds on top of, between and around these mounds, and we hoped for a sighting of a bison or the whole herd every time we saw around the next one. We got none.

I don't know quite what it was about Badlands. Certainly the bison and the bighorn sheep sightings helped but I think more than anything else it was the landscape and the weather. The place is so different between the badlands (small b) areas and the prairies. There's such a contrast between those two but it IS just those two. It's not like Yellowstone with their five or six or seven or eight or more different environments. Just badlands and prairie. I think it helped that it was sunny and windy to keep us warm and cool. I've been in windier places for sure in my life but I don't think I've ever seen birds fly into the wind and go exactly nowhere or seen fields of grass rippled to make them like impressionist painting backgrounds the way we saw at Badlands. All of that contributed to my love of that Park the second time around. 

And yes, we DID see the herd of bison we hoped to find. We found them on Sage Creek Rim Road, just like the website suggested we would. We actually saw multiple groups of bison along that road, in bachelor groups of twos and threes and a larger herd of what also looked like an all-male herd of 20 or 25 or so. We saw more bachelor bison in Badlands than in Wind Cave and Custer combined.

The herd was the best. 50, 60, maybe 70 bison. Too many to count quickly, or even at all if we had tried because they tend not to stand still. I get that this herd we came across is tiny compared to the sizes of the groups that used to roam the prairies and the hills and the forests and badlands of what is now South Dakota. Those days are gone. For now, the herds in Badlands and places like that are the best we have. Maybe one day they'll get bigger but they'll never get back to the numbers they used to have. There's not enough contiguous open space. Humans won't allow it.

Bison as far as the eye can see. And a baby up close. Badlands National Park.

There were plenty of future bison adults in the herd too. Juvenile males who will one day compete with their brothers and cousins for the right to the herd for themselves along with newly born calfs who couldn't have been more than a few months old, pale brown and not yet the darker color of their mothers or the brood born the prior year. It's encouraging seeing species survive and it's great that all three parks we visited have this circle of life continuing, even if it will never be what it was.

I don't think I'll be writing about bison again on this blog. These creatures have been such a source of joy as they have taken us to new states as we've come closer and closer to all fifty. I'd love to re-visit Yellowstone again someday. That place was definitely the number one bison Park I've ever been to and there's so many other things to see there. But Wind Cave and Custer measured up admirably based on their herd sizes and Badlands will go down as a signature National Park experience. I'm glad I went back. It was sort of a throw-in, too obvious to pass up. It definitely turned out to be so much more than that.

Pretty satisfied with Badlands National Park.

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How We Did It

Wind Cave National Park and Badlands National Park are open year round to visitors. Each Park has a single Visitor Center. Visitor Center hours vary by season at Wind Cave. Badlands' Visitor Center is open year round, except for certain holidays, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Clicking the name of each Park in this paragraph will take you to the Parks' Operating Hours & Seasons webpage. The gift store at Badlands, by the way, is incredible. We could have spent a fortune in that place.

One of the big draws to Wind Cave is the variety of cave tours offered daily into the Park's namesake underground cavern. We elected not to explore the cave. We've been in caves before and our schedule was full enough roaming around on the surface of the Earth that day Maybe one day we'll go back underground, but it wasn't to be in South Dakota.

Custer State Park is also open year round to visitors. Services which operate in the summer may not operate all year. There is a $20 admission for a seven day pass and season passes are available. The Park's brand new Bison Center is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Memorial Day to Labor Day with reduced hours during other seasons. There's some good information in the Bison Center but a visit isn't going to take that long.

If you are traveling between Custer State Park and Rapid City, I'd highly recommend a drive along the Needles Highway, otherwise known as South Dakota Route 87. We drove back to Rapid City along this road and the views are truly stunning, particularly through the last tunnel hewn out of a giant boulder.

The cover picture of this post is a detail of a sculpture on the southwest corner of 6th and Main Streets in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. There are other animals hidden in the sculpture of the native American on that street corner. The bison embedded in the figure's headdress seemed to be an appropriate cover photo to me.

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