Mount Rushmore

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Awe inspiring.

That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.

We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.

And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.

The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.

Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.

There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.

If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”

Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
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