Tourist Moments
A bus trip to see fireworks at Mt. Rushmore.
I’m not sure that those faces are really an improvement on the raw mountain, but it is so puffed up with patriotic fervor, flags and earnestness that I hardly dare complain. We went up once early on in the year, and paid our parking fee, which is good for a year. There is no actual entrance fee, and although it has some kind of national landmark status, no tax dollars are spend on it. There is a restaurant, a huge gift shop, and tours of the artist’s studio and etc. Somehow, those faces look like a stage set, as though they are cut outs put up close so they look far away, no way to get a sense of scale without climbing up there, which is forbidden and way too scary anyway. Mr. Borglum went up in a boson’s chair, and the dynamite came up the same way. He was certainly an obsessed madman to have given his life to such a project. There is a film about him and exhibits of photos and artifacts.
The fireworks show is definitely world class, and has a reputation, so hordes of people come and the parking gets full up early, and there are cars all the way down the mountain on the sides of the road, with hundreds of people walking up. For this reason, we go on a bus from the campground, leaving at 3:30 although the fireworks don’t begin until 9:00. And the higher we get, the rainier it gets. So we sit in the bus until it clears out about 6. Everyone and his brother is here, dressed in garbage bags or clear Mt Rushmore plastic raincoats, or carrying Mt. Rushmore umbrellas. As we drive up the mountain we pass miles of cars and people walking up in the rain.
The rain does stop and we hike around with our chairs and our picnic and sit off to the right of the stage. There is entertainment from a Native American singer who is singing like an opera star, and part of a military band from a Nebraska Air Force base, and some piped in rock and roll. The veterans are asked to stand and a few administrators and politicians have a few well-chosen words to say. At two points in the program we have a fly over by a B-52 and later a B-1 which go over very low, and fill the natural amphitheater with jet noise and with the huge size of the planes. At the end of America the Beautiful sung by the NA opera star, the stone faces begin to very slowly light up. There are huge spotlights in banks among the trees, and they go on at about a 30 count, so slow that you aren’t sure at first that they are lighting up. The angle of the lights is very different from daylight, so the faces are a bit changed.
There is a very long pause. I don’t know if the fireworks were wet or the matches (or whatever they use.) It may have been a dramatic effect, having us all wait so long. Then bam, screech, pow, the sky above the heads goes wild. There is canned music and the fireworks match the music. Enormous shells, hearts and showers of gold and silver, kabooms, and fountains on the rock above. It went on for maybe 25 minutes, and was really terrific, even if our necks were a little stiff with looking up.
There were supposedly 30,000 people there, and it took 2 hours for enough of them to get off the mountain so that our bus could go. I don’t know if I would go again, but the show was on a par with the fireworks that I watched on TV over Boston.
Wind Cave
For a long weekend, we took the Airstream and went south to Wind Cave National Park. The line of rocks around the outside of the Black Hills is limestone, and there are a number of commercial caves you can go into. Wind Cave is well to the southern end of the Black Hills, we saw where the hills ended in rolling prairie.
The cave is huge, miles and miles of passageways in the limestone that have been eroded by ancient water. Less than half of it has been explored even now; it claims to be the biggest cave in the world if you count the passageways all in a line, although they intertwine like noodles. We go on a tour, along pathways and stairs put in by the CCC. They carried the cement down in inner tubes slung over their shoulders.
Since this is a dry cave, the usual stalactites and stalagmites are missing, instead there is boxwork, four, five six and many sided boxes where harder sediment filled cracks in the limestone and then the limestone eroded, just leaving the “cracks”. The rock is reddish with iron, and the shapes of the sides are sometimes sharp and sometimes smooth, but it all feels a little like a journey through some giant creature’s innards. It is 52 degrees in there, and we are glad of a sweater which makes a nice change from the 100 plus temperatures above.
The park also includes a big chunk of prairie that we drive through, seeing more buffalo, and antelope. The campground is without services as I prefer, although there are rather more people there than I would have expected.
We go off geocaching in the area, lunch on a dirt road that looks way down to the southern mountains, a hot climb up to a ridge that over looks a wide green park. We drive through an abandoned homestead, the house, the barns and sheds, pieces of cars and tractors, and a crumbling corral. Those folks seemed to do well for a little, but I think a stream that went through dried up. Some of the old abandoned homesteads I’ve seen were clearly in a place that no one could have survived. Out in the open, no water nearby, only the thin prairie grasses rolling on for miles around, not even one tree for shade or wind shelter. So many people came out here believing the hype of the speculators and the railroads, thinking that you could actually farm out here. It works for grazing if you are lucky and have thousands of acres and water, but not for farming without expensive and extensive irrigation.
Work here at the camping ranch continues in a varied pattern of short-term quick fix repairs and long term construction projects. There have been several days where the temperature was over 100 degrees, once 112, and the wind blows at you like a giant hair dryer until you can hardly breathe.
I’m not sure that those faces are really an improvement on the raw mountain, but it is so puffed up with patriotic fervor, flags and earnestness that I hardly dare complain. We went up once early on in the year, and paid our parking fee, which is good for a year. There is no actual entrance fee, and although it has some kind of national landmark status, no tax dollars are spend on it. There is a restaurant, a huge gift shop, and tours of the artist’s studio and etc. Somehow, those faces look like a stage set, as though they are cut outs put up close so they look far away, no way to get a sense of scale without climbing up there, which is forbidden and way too scary anyway. Mr. Borglum went up in a boson’s chair, and the dynamite came up the same way. He was certainly an obsessed madman to have given his life to such a project. There is a film about him and exhibits of photos and artifacts.
The fireworks show is definitely world class, and has a reputation, so hordes of people come and the parking gets full up early, and there are cars all the way down the mountain on the sides of the road, with hundreds of people walking up. For this reason, we go on a bus from the campground, leaving at 3:30 although the fireworks don’t begin until 9:00. And the higher we get, the rainier it gets. So we sit in the bus until it clears out about 6. Everyone and his brother is here, dressed in garbage bags or clear Mt Rushmore plastic raincoats, or carrying Mt. Rushmore umbrellas. As we drive up the mountain we pass miles of cars and people walking up in the rain.
The rain does stop and we hike around with our chairs and our picnic and sit off to the right of the stage. There is entertainment from a Native American singer who is singing like an opera star, and part of a military band from a Nebraska Air Force base, and some piped in rock and roll. The veterans are asked to stand and a few administrators and politicians have a few well-chosen words to say. At two points in the program we have a fly over by a B-52 and later a B-1 which go over very low, and fill the natural amphitheater with jet noise and with the huge size of the planes. At the end of America the Beautiful sung by the NA opera star, the stone faces begin to very slowly light up. There are huge spotlights in banks among the trees, and they go on at about a 30 count, so slow that you aren’t sure at first that they are lighting up. The angle of the lights is very different from daylight, so the faces are a bit changed.
There is a very long pause. I don’t know if the fireworks were wet or the matches (or whatever they use.) It may have been a dramatic effect, having us all wait so long. Then bam, screech, pow, the sky above the heads goes wild. There is canned music and the fireworks match the music. Enormous shells, hearts and showers of gold and silver, kabooms, and fountains on the rock above. It went on for maybe 25 minutes, and was really terrific, even if our necks were a little stiff with looking up.
There were supposedly 30,000 people there, and it took 2 hours for enough of them to get off the mountain so that our bus could go. I don’t know if I would go again, but the show was on a par with the fireworks that I watched on TV over Boston.
Wind Cave
For a long weekend, we took the Airstream and went south to Wind Cave National Park. The line of rocks around the outside of the Black Hills is limestone, and there are a number of commercial caves you can go into. Wind Cave is well to the southern end of the Black Hills, we saw where the hills ended in rolling prairie.
The cave is huge, miles and miles of passageways in the limestone that have been eroded by ancient water. Less than half of it has been explored even now; it claims to be the biggest cave in the world if you count the passageways all in a line, although they intertwine like noodles. We go on a tour, along pathways and stairs put in by the CCC. They carried the cement down in inner tubes slung over their shoulders.
Since this is a dry cave, the usual stalactites and stalagmites are missing, instead there is boxwork, four, five six and many sided boxes where harder sediment filled cracks in the limestone and then the limestone eroded, just leaving the “cracks”. The rock is reddish with iron, and the shapes of the sides are sometimes sharp and sometimes smooth, but it all feels a little like a journey through some giant creature’s innards. It is 52 degrees in there, and we are glad of a sweater which makes a nice change from the 100 plus temperatures above.
The park also includes a big chunk of prairie that we drive through, seeing more buffalo, and antelope. The campground is without services as I prefer, although there are rather more people there than I would have expected.
We go off geocaching in the area, lunch on a dirt road that looks way down to the southern mountains, a hot climb up to a ridge that over looks a wide green park. We drive through an abandoned homestead, the house, the barns and sheds, pieces of cars and tractors, and a crumbling corral. Those folks seemed to do well for a little, but I think a stream that went through dried up. Some of the old abandoned homesteads I’ve seen were clearly in a place that no one could have survived. Out in the open, no water nearby, only the thin prairie grasses rolling on for miles around, not even one tree for shade or wind shelter. So many people came out here believing the hype of the speculators and the railroads, thinking that you could actually farm out here. It works for grazing if you are lucky and have thousands of acres and water, but not for farming without expensive and extensive irrigation.
Work here at the camping ranch continues in a varied pattern of short-term quick fix repairs and long term construction projects. There have been several days where the temperature was over 100 degrees, once 112, and the wind blows at you like a giant hair dryer until you can hardly breathe.
posted by Thistledown24 at 10:25 AM
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