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Mount Rushmore’s Trail Plans Most visitors to Mount Rushmore National Memorial don’t realize that it’s actually a 1,278-acre park. Its boundaries stretch to the surrounding ridges, gulches and natural rock formations. Now the National Park Service is looking at plans to open a 6- to 10-mile hiking trail to let visitors to explore beyond the existing grounds of the National Memorial.
Travel Channel Gives Mount Rushmore & the Black Hills Some Love
The Travel Channel is featuring America's national parks this week, and it's kicking off the series tonight with Mount Rushmore & the Black Hills, which mostly focuses on the parks, monuments and scenic byways in western South Dakota. The hour-long program is filled with some epic, sweeping video of Rushmore, Custer State Park, the Norbeck Scenic Byway and Wind Cave National Park, including some great wildlife shots. I thought the elk bugling was really impressive, and it's always neat to see close-ups of buffalo, the largest land animals on the continent. The program spends a little bit of time in Deadwood, tying the gold rush of 1876 in with the history of the Lakota Sioux and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and then to the modern construction of Crazy Horse Memorial near Custer.
Black Hills Vacation Package Gets You Motorcycle & Massage
It's no secret that the Black Hills are a beautiful place to ride a bike. That's one of the reasons the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is one of the largest biker events in the world. Beautiful scenery is a big bonus when there's not much separating you and your vehicle from the Great Outdoors... But if riding during the Rally sounds a bit too crowded for your taste, or if the idea of hauling your motorcycle several hundred miles to the Black Hills is an extra hassle, you've got another option: the new Rent, Ride and Relax vacation package.
Frontiers And Ruins - Rockerville Flume Trail
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Cat's Cradle: "Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier." Since reading this passage I've come back to the idea several times and meditated upon it. The romantic notion of the American Frontier has surely inspired dozens of western-themed novels and films, and though it has undoubtedly shrunken in size, has the frontier really vanished?
Mount Rushmore From Space
It's a little small, but yes, this is Mount Rushmore viewed from the air. Actually, from the no-air-at-all. This is a satellite image from space, courtesy a fun site called Flash Earth. If you look carefully, you can make out the faces pretty well - Thomas Jefferson and George Washington particularly. You can even see the staircase leading up behind the sculpture (I'm sure the National Park Service loves that) and, just above and to the right of Theodore Roosevelt's head, the entrance to the Hall of Records. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum built this as a repository for copies of the most important political documents in mankind's history, such as the American Constitution and the British Magna Carta. He knew that Mount Rushmore would be one of the longest-lasting objects on earth, and he intended to use it to preserve the values of modern human society for as long as possible.
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