Look close--there's  a dinosaur on that hill!

Up on a hill, I saw something I'd been looking for since we arrived in Rapid City: dinosaurs! There were some dinosaur statues up on a hill that had been there since I was a kid. It was one of my few childhood memories of Rapid City. Highway 16 led through and out of town. We began a long, slow climb into the Black Hills. There's always been a magical quality about the Black Hills, the way the tall, ponderosa pines stretch up to the sky, the way clouds caress the treetops and hug the peaks.

Suddenly, towering above the trees, we saw them: the majestic carved faces of Mt. Rushmore. We arrived just after 9 AM local time. My National Parks Pass got us in for free, but there was an $8 parking fee I wasn't prepared for.      The visitor's center was much different than I remembered it. When we visited back in 1969, everything was pretty much like it was in the movie "North by Northwest," with a big, wooden deck and vast, rustic lodge. That was all gone, replaced by a granite gauntlet of stone and flagpoles. The architecture was kind of soviet, actually. We wore long sleeves, because it was still very chilly out.   We watched a movie about the carving of Mt. Rushmore. One of the displays had video clips of Mt. Rushmore from various TV shows. Zack was amused by the one from "The Muppet Show," with the faces telling jokes. We hit the bookstore and gift shop. There were stacks of Rushmore books, magnets, shirts and other souveniers. I told one vendor about visiting when I was a kid. The gift shop back then had little presidental pencil sharpeners; they had Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln... and Kennedy. He was amused by that, and told me a souvenier from the year before had Lincoln --with a mustache. "That was discounted," he added. We stayed a little over an hour before heading out again.

Zack at Mt. Rushmore

The whole area around Mt. Rushmore was busy with tourists. The road had many recreational vehicles, some of which were so huge the passengers needed to get out and guide them around the steep mountain curves. The rain had stopped, and baby blue skies started to peek through the clouds. Seventeen miles down Highway 16, the road widened, and coming around a corner the Crazy Horse monument came into view.
 

The Crazy Horse Monument, as it appeared in December, 1970

Crazy Horse in May, 2005

The last time I'd been by was Christmastime, 1970. Snow frosted the little dirt road off to the lonely mountain. This time, however, the well-maintained road was 4-lanes wide and very busy. Crazy Horse wasn't a federal or state project: it was all privately funded, which was why it cost $10 a head to get in. When Mom & Dad took us there in 1969 or so, there was a tiny parking lot. A row of columns with busts on the top led to the little studio. The sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, was still alive back then. He happened to be up on the mountain when we were there, but I got to peek back into the private part of the residence. I remembered a deck with a big plaster version of what the finished mountain would look like. Much construction had been since those days, but a lot of the artist's original studio had been reproduced. The original deck was now roofed-over, and a deck 10 times as big faced the mountain. They'd made a lot of progress since 1969. The face was finished, and hundreds of tons of rock had been removed. When completed, Crazy Horse would be the largest sculpture in the world.

Snow-covered Flintstone's Bedrock City, December, 1970

Me, at Bedrock City, May, 2005

We saw one section of the park where there had been a fire: blackened, dead trees littered a hillside. A forest can take a hundred years recovering from something like that. Outcroppings of moss-covered rock peeked through the Earth, and every turn revealed a new pastoral view. We were taking it slow down the narrow park road, and I was looking at some unusual rocks when Zack cried out, "Deer!" And there they were: a family of three deer grazing alongside the road. Seemingly unafraid of us, they stuck around long enough for me to snap off some pictures. That was a delightful surprise.

We'd seen deer and prairie dogs on our visit to Custer State Park, but no buffalo. I was resigned to the idea until we were less than a mile from the park exit --and then, off to the side of the road, buffalo! There were three of them, just lounging in the summer sun. Huge creatures, they hardly took any notice of us at all as we passed by.

At 2:13 local time, the lonely road crossed the border into Nebraska. The road had some construction at various points where traffic was reduced to one lane. There was, however, no crossing guard to direct traffic. It seemed like opposing traffic was just presumed to behave themselves and take turns. So, when we came to the next one, I did. Traffic lined up on each end of the construction zone, and one by one the cars went through, drivers waving to each other as they went. There were very few turns in the road. We passed some pretty, wooded hills outside of Chadron, but otherwise the view offered only vast, vibrant farmlands. A rabbit zipped across our path. The highway followed railroad tracks through the sandhills. At 3:21 Mountain time, I arrived in Alliance, Nebraska, "An Oasis in the Sand Hills." There was something at this oasis I couldn't pass up: Carhenge.

Signs on the main street direct traffic through town, and then back north along Highway 87. At first, it's just more of the same farmland and signs, but then it comes into view on the east side of the road. The sign at the parking lot calls it an "Art Car Reserve." The scale of Carhenge is staggering. The artist really used cars in a reproduction of Stonehenge in England, recreating it down to the "stones" that were knocked off and half-buried. A bulletin board displays news clippings of Carhenge, as well as diagrams of the original in England. A guy in a red shirt was reading the clippings, apparently overwhelmed. I mentioned, "Looks like somebody had a lot of time on their hands." "That's just what I was thinking!" he laughed. We walked among the upturned cars, the only sound the whispering breath of the Nebraska winds. It was a surreal, whimsical place, and in it's own bizzare way, lovely and peaceful.

The skies had completely cleared by the time we headed back to the motel. I tried out the hot tub, and it was very hot (102 degrees) and very relaxing. That night, as we watched "Storm of the Century" on TV, I received very welcome text messages from some friends back home in Broken Arrow. They were out drinking at my favorite pub, and thought of me. They made me smile. Zack crashed early, and I fell asleep about 10 PM. We'd driven 261 miles from Rapid City to Scottsbluff.