Featured Road - Meeting With The President

Featured Road

Meeting With The Presidents

The Driving Story Behind (and around) Mount Rushmore

Story | Kelly Taylor

It is, perhaps, the largest, permanently unfinished sculpture in art history. Mount Rushmore, depicting four U.S. presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln — is also South Dakota’s most-recognized tourist attraction, drawing millions of visitors every year.

Often overlooked, however, is the series of amazing drive routes and wealth of other attractions in the area, from the Needles, to Crazy Horse, to Deadwood, the Wild-West town made famous by the HBO series of the same name.

An area almost twice the size of Yellowstone National Park, a driving holiday here in the Black Hills region could easily take a week just to see everything. Make sure your passengers are packing dramamine, just in case.

Your tour of the area should begin at your hotel in Deadwood. It’s about an hour away from Mount Rushmore, but the drive is worth it, especially in summer when you can wind your way through the seasonal back roads.

“ Rushmore is a marvel, with the heads of each president 18.3 metres tall, perched

152 metres above the viewing area.”

The town has retained a strong wild west flavour, with some of its original hotels converted to casinos but looking every bit the kind of places you would have seen Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane or Wyatt Earp.

The quickest route to Mount Rushmore is via South Dakota Highway 385, but my recommendation is to take Rochford Road, which will take you on a delightfully twisty path through Rochford, Mystic, and Nahant.

On the way, you can take in the Black Hills Mining Museum in Lead, ski at Deer Mountain in winter or hike the George S. Mickleson Trail in summer. Watch for seasonal road closures, however. This area is quite high in elevation, and some of the roads are open in summer only.

Just 25 kilometres from Mount Rushmore, work continues on the Crazy Horse Memorial, a monument to the Oglala Lakota warrior that already dwarfs the more famous Rushmore. Completed, Crazy Horse will be 195 metres long (641 feet) and 172 metres (563 feet) high. By comparison, Rushmore’s heads are 18.3 metres tall, while the head of Crazy Horse by itself will be 27 metres (87 feet) tall. He will be riding a horse and pointing into the distance.

The project began in 1948 and 70 years later remains decades away from completion. Currently, only his head has been revealed from the granite, with the rough outline of the top of his arm visible.

Standing at the base of the visitors’ centre, looking up at the scope of the work, at how much of the man and the horse is still hidden in the huge granite mountain and the amount of labour still required, is awe-inspiring. The irony of the Crazy Horse Memorial’s location, in Custer County, won’t be lost on those who know their history.

Drivers will also have to check out the Needles, a collection of granite spires not far from Crazy Horse and Rushmore in Custer State Park. The roads are narrow and twisty, the scenery breathtaking, and the Needles themselves fascinating.

A highlight of the Needles drive is the tunnel, a short passage carved between two spires that is barely big enough for an intercity coach to fit through.

If you’re a movie buff, just more than an hour away in Wyoming is undoubtedly the most famous formation of porphyritic phonolite in the world. Devil’s Tower National Monument, as seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind rises 265 metres above Ponderosa pines.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s must-see Spielberg. And, it’s shown nightly at the base of the tower during camping season.

Gettng to the area is not the easiest: if you have to fly, Rapid City Regional Airport welcomes regular flights from hubs in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Dallas, and Newark, among others. Otherwise, driving to Deadwood is 11 hours from Winnipeg, 22 hours from Toronto or 14 hours from Calgary.