The Pictures Worth Thousands of Words

It's time again for the annual family vacation wrap-up. This year, we dragged our children 10 hours to spend a week camping by Mt. Rushmore. Here is the play by play.

Day 1: Drive. All. Day. Friends had told me that we would see a lot of bikers on our trip because apparently Mt. Rushmore is some kind of Mecca for all Harley afficianados. They couldn't have been more right. It turns out that the exact week that we were scheduled to be in the park is also known as the Sturgis Road Rally. The largest Harley Rally anywhere in the world! As we finally pulled into Custer National Park where we would be camping, the streets in the small town of Custer had been partitioned off to allow room for motorcycles to be parked right down the middle of main street. There were literally hundreds of bikes in every direction. My first reaction was that this was going to make it a hard week to be in South Dakota, but it actually turned out great. Every "family" activity in the area was completely empty all week. We literally had the lakes and hikes to ourselves, and the bikers that we did chat with throughout our adventure were all very friendly and helpful.

(insert picture of main street Custer with bikes and bikers flooding the street)

Nothing daunted we drove up to our campsite at 6:45, jumped out and started some charcoal to cook our foil dinners and set up camp. Then we discovered the bathroom. You see when I had made our camping reservations in June, I had specifically searched for a campsite with flush bathrooms. Apparently the national parks website is outdated because it turns out that in the entire state park there is only one campground without flush toilets...ours. That's right, it would be vault all week for us. Yuck!

Day 2: The main event. We left fairly early to see the Mt. Rushmore monument. We were pleasantly surprised to find it not too crowded. It seems that bikers are not morning people. Cory has been dreaming of this day for as long as we have been married. I was only hoping the mountain would live up to his expectations. It did. It's actually pretty amazing. There is a little half mile loop you can walk that leads you right up to the base of the mountain where you can come at different vantage points of the faces as you wind around the trail. There is also a little Indian village set up where the kids climbed in a teepee and played with buffalo parts.

(insert picture of Isaac holding 2 buffalo horns on the sides of his head, and picture of Anna scraping the hair off of a buffalo hide.)

We took our time with only minor tantrums and had a nice morning.

(insert several pictures of this:)

(from different angles and with different family members in the foreground)

After a lunch of buffalo burgers, we took a drive around the Wildlife trail in Custer Park. For the first half of the drive the only wildlife we saw were the bugs splattered on the windshield, but finally on the south end of the park there was a herd? pack? stampede? of wild burros. They didn't look all that wild, but they did manage to spook a deer out of the fold and we watched her high-tail it into the trees. As we pulled away, we drove slowly alongside a stubborn burro that had decided it was more interesting to walk right down the middle of the road.

(insert picture of burro with face in passenger window)

Five minutes later we found ourselves at the front of a motorcycle traffic jam! There was a herd of enormous buffalo taking up the entire road. We got out and took pictures and chatted with some colorful characters from Texas for about 15 minutes before the first Harleys decided to brave the drive through the herd, and we followed cautiously behind. Only one menacing bull began to charge a biker, but he apparently had already had his exercise for the day because it was a pretty half-hearted attempt.

(insert picture of buffalo littering the road and roadside)

We finished up the day with a walk around Bismarck lake at our campground. It was beautiful and filled with other sorts of wildlife. We saw a beaver home, turtles, fish, astonishing spider webs, cattails, and an amazing egret as it took flight.

(insert pictures of beaver home and spider web)

Day 3: This morning was devoted to "Crazy Horse." This mountain carving of the famous Indian warrior dwarfs the four presidents on Mt. Rushmore. The presidents would all fit in Crazy Horse's hair. Work has been progressing on this colossal sculpture for 70 years and although 1 and 1/2 million tons of rock have been removed so far, I sincerely doubt this will ever be finished in my lifetime. When we watched the information video at the visitor center, we were introduced to the sculptor who conceived this mammoth endeavor...Korczak Ziolkowski..I began to understand why bikers are drawn to this place.

He was either totally visionary or totally crazy. At any rate almost all of the work done to date has been done by this man and his 10 children. He believed firmly in a free economy and declined federal funding to move the process along multiple times in his lifetime. He died in the 80's, and now the project is headed by his wife and 7 of their children and everything is done strictly through donation and park entry fees. The visitors center includes a Native American museum that is fascinating and we all truly enjoyed our visit...even the dog.

(insert following picture, but with all 4 kids standing at the base and pointing in the same direction as Crazy Horse, and Grendel standing with them.)

After a full morning at the monument and museum, we headed back to camp, changed into swimsuits, grabbed our sack lunches and headed over to Legion Lake for the day. We rented a paddleboat, swam and splashed and even played on a small playground next to the beach. Grendel even got in on the act and took a turn out on the paddleboat. Of course, he kept trying to stand at the front of the boat to sniff the water and fell in twice. By the end of the day we were hot, sunburned and exhausted. We drove over to a neighboring campground to take a warm shower, then went back to camp to make dinner.

In the evening we went back to Mt. Rushmore to see their evening program. First a ranger came out and gave a patriotic speech. When she finished, Anna looked at me and did a "huffy breath" and said, "That was LONG!" I concur. Then we watched a video about the making of Mt. Rushmore and a little about the lives of the 4 presidents immortalized in stone. Finally, they asked any past or present servicemen/women to please come to the stage to be honored and participate in the flag lowering. Having all those motorcyle riders there meant the stage swelled with around 300 veterans! It was pretty cool. Then we sang the national anthem and Anna started crying and couldn't quite find the words to express why. I think it confused her to be filled with that kind of emotion. We got home late and after a day in the sun, sleeping bags never seemed so comfortable and we all collapsed into sleep.

Day 4: Jewel Cave. I love caves! About 20 miles east of Custer Park, lies Jewel Cave. We drove over and took a morning tour. The cave is full of interesting calcite formations and was a pleasant 49 degrees 7 stories underground on a blistering day outside. The kids found the formations cool and creepy. Our favorite is a curtain formation aptly titled: Bacon. It looks exactly like a foot wide slice of bacon!

(insert picture of Cory next to stalactite to give it scale)

In the afternoon we drove over to Keystone, a mining town on the other side of Mt. Rushmore. We ate lunch there and started out for a walk down the "old town" main street. We didn't get very far because it was hot and packed with Sturgis Road Rally crowds deporting themselves in stereotypical "harley rider" fashion. We left quickly but it was something of an education...cigar smoke, street tatooing, and the kids got to witness their very first arrest as one biker failed the breathalyzer and was handcuffed and loaded into the back of a highway patrol vehicle. I'm the kind of mom who thinks vacations should be filled with learning opportunities.

We drove back via another scenic route that includes some spectacular tunnels cut into rock that frame Mt. Rushmore in the distance. It was so cool! We also came across some Bighorn Sheep grazing on the side of the road.

Shortly after we got back to our campsite it started raining so we headed into the tent and played cards. This was seriously one of my favorite moments of the vacation...just a chance to be together and relax.

Day 5: Hike day. The weather dropped 20 degrees overnight which made it a perfect day to plan some hikes. First we drove up to Sylvan Lake via the last scenic loop of the park...the Needles Highway. We passed the lake and drove to some even narrower rock-carved tunnels where we got a view of the jutting cliffs that give the "needles" highway its name. We looked at the "Needle's Eye" and then hiked to "Cathedral Spires." It was a 3 mile round trip hike listed as moderate to strenuous, but I think South Dakota hikers must be soft because Anna and Grendel had no trouble with it. Well, except for the one spot of scrabbling that took Grendel 4 tries.

(insert picture of Grendel on trail)

After lunch we went on a second hike around Sylvan Lake. The lake was beautiful and had some really neat "black hills" jutting up out of the water. In retrospect, this would have been a much more interesting lake for swimming and paddle-boating earlier in the week, but alas hindsight, and all that jazz.

After finishing out our drive, we went to town for a round of Mini Golf. Anna won and treated us all to ice cream at Dairy Queen.

Back at camp we decided to hike one more time down to our Camp lake and see if we could get all the way around it. After climbing a lot of rocks and reaching what we thought was the halfway point, we discovered the lake looped back much father than we realized and decided we had better turn back or risk being out after dark.

To celebrate our final night we built a huge fire (the first night it actually felt cool enough to want a big fire) and made a perfect Dutch Oven Peach Cobbler. We played some more games, stayed up late, and soliloquized about the joys of a hot shower and clean sheets.

Day 6: Around 5 a.m. I woke to the sound of rain on the tent roof and began to worry about a muddy day to pack up camp. I went back to sleep...sorta...and by the time we got up at 6:30, it had stopped. The sky still looked ominous so we ate quickly and loaded everything up in record time. As we pulled out of our campsite, it started to rain again! Phew!

The return trip was every bit as long, but we survived and even found time to unload the car when we got home and create the last of the week's landmarks.."laundry mountain."

It was really a great trip, but I'm afraid my memory of this vacation will always be marred by the fact that on the last day of the trip, we discovered my camera was missing. We don't know if it was somehow dropped somewhere or stolen, but after exhaustive searching we knew for sure it was gone for good...with a week's worth of pictures inside it. I really couldn't care less about the camera, but it was heart-breaking to lose those photos..mostly because I'm fairly certain we will never be back to Mt. Rushmore as a family. And I know there are worse things we could have lost...my wallet, the car keys, one of our children (with perhaps one notable exception)..but it still hurts. I am so good at forgetting to take pictures or to even bring my camera with me in the first place, so this outcome feels bitterly ironic. At any rate, I am hoping that my detailed although sometimes dry play by play of this vacation will be enough to fix the memories in my mind and in the minds of my children. Because if this isn't a thousand words...it must be close.