20060827 - South Dakota

8/27 We spent this week in South Dakota in Hill City near Mount Rushmore. We had wonderful weather at the beginning of the week: warm, not hot or humid. Near the end of the week it got a little chilly and rainy.

On Monday we went to Mount Rushmore. Driving in, It looked completely different than I remembered. I remember a large outdoor parking area, now there are huge parking buildings. Turns out, in 1990 they completely redid the visitor area. When we were last here, the parking lot could handle only 300 cars. That was not much room when they were having 3,000,0000 visitors a year so what they did makes a lot of sense. Treasure Hunters did a section in Mount Rushmore where they were looking for one of their clue items. While we were here, Rich and I were trying to just find the clues. We found the Presidential trail. We found two places where you could only see two of the presidents. We found the place where they went off the trail, but we could not figure out how they knew to go off the trail at that point. Since there were signs all over the place not to go off the trail, I asked a ranger how they handled the show. He told me that they closed the Presidential Trail for the shoot. We also visited the Sculpture Studio. In it we saw the ninth model of the sculpture. A Ranger gave a talk about how the workers transferred the measurements from the model to the mountain. It was very interesting.



This a shot of the Model. It is 1/12 the size of the mountain. The original design included more than faces but WWII and the death of the primary designer changed the design.



This is a shot of Mount Rushmore



This a collage of my best shots of each of the Mount Rushmore faces



This is an awesome profile view of George.

On Tuesday we went to the Badlands. I drove us through the Park where we took lots of pictures. It was a beautiful day. I kept thinking of how I could design a quilt with the Badlands as a design start. Strata made up of strips of yellows, grays, white, pinks, and purples. Cut up the strata to form the pinnacles and spires and then put on a beautiful blue for the Blue sky. The gorgeous colors would make a great quilt. It is a long trip as you follow the edge of the prairie where the edge is sharply eroded to make this beautiful land. In the beginning we were looking up at the spires and by the end we were looking down into the canyons.