Day 242 of a Year Long Road Trip Along America’s Scenic Byways
Another great day in South Dakota! I have been pleasantly surprised. I expected mostly flatland and prairie like Nebraska and North Dakota, but the Black Hills resemble the foot hills in Colorado. We climbed through the pines to a towering granite outcropping carved with four presidential faces…Mount Rushmore!
Mount Rushmore
The national memorial pays tribute to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Each face is sixty feet tall from brow to chin and the each eye is eleven feet wide. It took 400 workers 14 years to carve the monument with dynamite and jackhammers, and it cost just under one million dollars to complete.
The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, envisioned carving the presidents to their waist. But with his death in 1941 and our nations involvement in World War II, his son who had accompanied him on the project declared it finished.
ON THE ROAD AGAIN!