Wok N Roll with us...Bob and Teri Along with Atlas and Kalani: Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park and more. September 25

In 1923, Doane Robinson came up with the idea of carving several legendary western figures into a mountain in South Dakota in order to attract more tourists to the area. His original idea was to carve someone like Buffalo Bill Cody, Lewis and Clark or even the Sioux Chief Red Cloud. The Sioux had called the area home for generations and that idea was considered very controversial. He contacted sculptor Gutzon Borglum who did not care for Robinson’s idea of inscribing western heroes into the landscape. Borglum said, “I want to create a monument so inspiring that people from all over America will be drawn to come and look and go home better citizens,”. In Borglum’s mind, the creation of four U.S. presidents would offer a more alluring and a more inspiring message than Buffalo Bill and Red Cloud could. He chose the presidents for their significant contribution to the founding (Washington), expansion (Jefferson), preservation (Teddy Roosevelt), and unification of the country (Lincoln).

It took 14 years to complete Mount Rushmore at a cost just short of a million dollars. There were over 400 men that worked on the mountain sculpture, and not a single death occurred during those 14 years. Mount Rushmore once had an amateur baseball team and because of this men were often hired for their baseball skills as opposed to their drilling skills. Each day drillers would bore deep holes into the granite, then the ‘powder monkey’ (the person trained in explosives) would place the dynamite into each of the holes. At both the lunch break and at the end of the day, the charges would be detonated. Ninety percent of the 450,000 tons of granite removed from the mountain was done with the use of dynamite. In 1937, a bill was introduced to Congress to add the image of women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony to the mountain. Congress, however, quickly passed a bill to limit the carvings to only the original four presidents. We visited the Mount Rushmore Monument during both the daylight and evening hours.

The completion of the Mount Rushmore Memorial to four U.S. presidents on what was once Lakota land prompted the Lakota Chief Standing Bear to recruit and commission Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to build Crazy Horse – a granite carving that would "show the white man that the red man has heroes, too." Upon its completion, the sculpture was to become the largest mountain carving in the world. We also visited this carving. Its size is impressive and the onsite museum is interesting as well. But progress on the carving has been slow and in recent years there have been mixed feelings among Lakota members. These nonprofit organization salaries go to almost exclusively Ziolkowski family members and it is speculated that there is little apparent investment in the most important part of their mission – completing the carving. It was presented that Ziolkowski proclaimed an aversion to government support because he feared that the bureaucrats would dilute the monument’s intended message. Government involvement, however, would also provide increased transparency of how the foundation monies are being spent. While we first felt that this monument would serve to spotlight a group of people who were marginalized for much of this country's history, with so little progress having been made in 70 years, one needs to at least question if the original goal has been lost to an income source for the third generation of Ziolkowski family members.

Custer State Park is beautiful. Every direction that one looks seems worthy of a picture. We saw beautiful landscapes, pronghorns, donkeys, and buffalo. As we traveled through the park so much of the landscape changed. The Needles highway and Sylvan Lake area are covered with rock spires and the Needles tunnel just as it sounds is very, like very, very narrow. Custer State Park is probably best described by its beauty which we hope you can see in the pictures shared here.

Nearby is one of the top fossil interpretive sites in North America, the Mammoth of Hot Springs. This Site is an internationally renowned indoor working paleontological site and museum. More than 62 Columbian & Woolly mammoths have been unearthed here, as well as over 85 other species of associated Ice Age fauna. We not only got to see some incredible fossils but we also got to view the paleontologists hard at work at this working site.

We visited Jewel Cave National Monument. The one picture we included of inside the cave may not look that impressive or at least not until you realize we took this picture from 42 stories below ground level. Jewel Cave with more than 195 miles of mapped passageways to date, is the third longest cave in the world. And, airflow studies indicate that there is still a lot of passageways yet to discover. The elevation span of the cave is known to be 832 feet.

Next up was a drive through Spearfish Canyon where the gorgeous colors were vibrantly encoring the end of summer. We had lunch in Deadwood a historic mining town that sadly has had all its historic charm replaced by numerous casinos. We ended this day in Deadwood at Tatanka. Tatanka is the Lakota word meaning big beast. The Tatanka museum tells the story of how the buffalo (bison) played such a significant role in the lives of the Lakota people. Bison were the basis of life for the Lakota. They provided spiritual inspiration, food, clothing, shelter, tools, weapons, and ceremonial items. Every part of the bison was used. Even the bison bladder was made into a canteen vessel to carry water. We listened to a very informative talk by Billy a Lakota native and all of the antique items in the museum people were free to touch and hold (gently). Outdoors at the museum are spectacular, larger than life bronze sculptures featuring 14 bison pursued by three Lakota riders. Peggy Detmers was the artist commissioned by Kevin Costner to create these beautiful pieces of art. They originally were to be part of the Dunbar Resort, a building venture of Costner that later failed. He repurposed the art making it the centerpiece of a small museum to honor the ways of the Lakota.

Our last day in this area we headed to Bear Country. Bear Country features the world’s largest collection of privately owned black bears. It is a 3 mile drive through wildlife park that gave us some incredible up-close encounters with black bears, grizzly bears and various other other species of North American animals like buffalo, wolves, and elk. The visit was a great way to end our time in the beautiful Custer State Park area.

The weather has really gotten cold and we even had snow. It's time to move on as they say and maybe get some warmer weather too. Tomorrow we are headed for Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.