Day 56 Hill City to Keystone via Mt Rushmore 46km

Ahhh! A day of, relative, rest! Kerstin wants to be a "real" tourist today, so we don't set an alarm, have an all you can eat pancake breakfast (4 for me and 6 for Kerstin), and tootle out on the still fantastic Mickleson Trail to Crazy Horse Memorial. Sure it's 7 miles of uphill, but since we have to come back the same way there is the reciprocal 7 miles of downhill to compensate. The Memorial is huge, the biggest sculpture in the world, and we are suitably impressed by it and the ongoing work of the immigrant family who stand behind it.


The next big tourist endeavor of the day is calling Kerstin's name, so we roll on towards Mt Rushmore. I don't believe that anyone ever considered that people would ride their bikes to this "shrine of democracy", the road certainly is not bike friendly, blind corners, steep ups and screaming downs, and, as always, the ever present, ridiculously large and occasionally dangerous RVs. But hills always mean one thing... views, and they were beautiful, with the Black Hills all around us.


You can understand why these hills are considered sacred by the native people. Why they believe that the origin of life itself came from these hills, and why they fought and still continue to fight for stewardship of the area. Which was actually given to them in a treaty that was supposed to last forever but in reality lasted 6 years until gold was discovered in the hills. For the heads of four dead, white men to then be carved into these sacred hills using dynamite (90% of the sculpting was done this way), seems to me to be the ultimate degradation of a sacred place. And I felt very uncomfortable playing the tourist in this place, one of thousands. At least we weren't charged the parking fee, as "if you ride up that hill you deserve to get in for free" so we rolled on past the queuing air conditioned cars, trucks and RVs and parked our bikes right at the entrance! Feeling pretty self satisfied it must be said.


We could only manage the tourist express for so long, and the enormous gift shop, if you ever need to cross-stitch Mt Rushmore I can hook you in, and some very expensive ice cream nearly did us in. A roaring 2 miles straight down cleared our heads and a race with an old steam train accompanied by some cheering by its occupants got us to another lovely, green and well appointed campground in perfect time to be safely inside our tent when the skies opened and copious amounts of rain, thunder and lightning made us glad for every dollar over budget we went on our trusty tent. As well as reminding us that no matter how many faces we may carve into rock, nature is still in charge. Posted using BlogPress from my iPad