The second day of our tour out west was spent at Mount Rushmore – seeing it in the daylight hours. Like so many things I would see on this trip, I could only think, it was worth the seventy years I’ve been waiting to see this. If you look really closely on top of George Washington’s head you can see a little black spot – there were a couple of men up on top of it that day, checking for cracks, erosion, etc – something that is done periodically, we learned. We looked through one of those viewfinders that you could feed quarters into, and you could see them pointing and spreading out rolls of papers and everything. That was pretty cool.
One thing I absolutely loved at Mount Rushmore, and I’ve come to find out that these areas are at many other National Parks, was the First Amendment areas. Our guide told us that anyone could come and share anything they wanted with the public. They did have to register ahead of time so there would be enough room, but he said they had people come to teach yoga to the public, preach, give political speeches – just the whole gamut. How American is that?
From there we went to Crazy Horse Memorial. We were with a tour guide, so were able to go up pretty close to the monument itself. We learned that this summer they had mostly been working on his knuckles, so I was trying to zoom in to get a picture of those. What a great, great day.
