Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Mt Rushmore is 2 miles from downtown Keystone, SD.   Keystone is basically a tourist trap with every kind of souvenir shop and questionable activity known to man.   From the trading posts, cheap Chinese made souvenirs to ziplines, western gun fights, gold mines, train rides and tours, Keystone has it all.  Fortunately Mt Rushmore is isolated from all this garishness.   It stands alone out on beautiful Forest and rock covered lands of the Black Hills.

The Monument was conceived as a way to bring tourism to the Black Hills Region.   Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was given the task of carving the faces into the Black Hills Granite.   The Sculptor chose a mountain with a Southern face to get maximum effect from the rising and setting sun.  He also chose the four Presidents instead of some of the Western figures originally proposed such as Lewis and Clark.

Bust of Gutzon Borglum

Funding

The local congressman Peter Norbeck helped secure enough funding for Gutzon in 1925.   I seriously doubt if this would happen today.   I can't imagine asking for Federal money to deface a mountain, the outcry from environmental groups and tree huggers would be a roar heard from coast to coast.

After first constructing a scale model,  Gutzon began the actual work of carving the mountain in 1927.    The scale model was continually checked manually with a protractor and ruler.  The carving task involved precision drilling into rock to controlled depths, setting dynamite charges to fracture the rock then finishing the carving and smoothing with a jackhammer.  Work was ended in 1941 with just the heads completed even though the original plan called for full figures from the waist up.  A combination of a lack of funding and a country focused on the war effort with the Nation's resources committed to World War II led to the declaration that the sculpture was complete.

Parking

Mt Rushmore is free but a toll booth collects money for a parking pass.  This turned out to be a slow process since the ticket is actually a parking pass good for a year at the cost of $11.  The problem is the license number of your car is printed on the pass.  Since our car was a rental car this was meaningless and just served to slow the process down compared to a normal toll booth where you would just pay and go.  The great news is the parking is in a parking garage which is nicely tucked away into the hillside.  This is a much better solution to the problem of too many vehicles without having to construct a massive ugly above ground structure which would be an eyesore. 

Our rental car in the parking structure