Mount Rushmore & Crazy Horse memorial

Before I talk about todays adventures I have to do a correction. Yesterday when I said that the Bad Lands were as  monotinous as the rest of South Dakota...well I wasnt completely correct. We discovered today that we took the wrong turn and missed most of the Bad Lands....Hilarious. We will go back and take the correct way.

I don't think either of us ever thought we would see Mount Rushmore with our own eyes, but today we did. The first time you see the faces of the 4 President (from the left - Washington, Jefferson, T Roosevelt & Lincoln) you say WOW then you think... they are much smaller than what you thought they were. That is until you stand right in front of them. It is amazing that someone sculpted them out of the rock. The sculpter made a plaster of what he wanted the heads to look and they were taken up to the site so that the people working there could use them as a reference.  They used dynamite and pnumatic hammers to do the sculpting.

Just imagine to get all that equipmet up there, and the enviroment that they had work in. Hanging down the side of the cliff on a rope. And also how they knew they were cutting (and blasting) in the correct place.

Half way through the work they had to change the design of the skulpturs due to the state of the rock.

When you walk up to the monument you go past pillars with 4 flags on each. They are the state flags and on the pillars it says which state they are from and when they became part of the union. The only flag we recognized was the flag for Texas (the Lone Star State).

We then went on to the Crazy Horse Memorial. The local Indians wanted to show the white people that they also have heroes. The sculptor started work on it in 1948 but there is a long way to go before itis finished. The sculptor died in early 1980's, but his wife and most of their 10!! children have kept going.

One story we heard while we was there was that when one the sons were moving some of the blasted rock away with a bulldozer, he went to close to the edge and it went over. He managed to jump of the bulldozer before it went down. His father thought he was dead until he saw him standing up dusting himself down. And as only a father could say he said: *Well you got it down there...you get it up from there*