Vandrea Does America: Day 58 (Friday 8/17/12)- Wind Cave + Keystone, SD

Just recaping the day's events seems overwhelming. Not only did we cross into South Dakota, we hiked through an authentically one of a kind cave, drove through two thirds of Custer State Park, got stuck in a bison traffic jam and saw Mount Rushmore.

After a mellow couple of days in Nebraksa I was looking forward to moving on to South Dakota, only to find it a 100 mile long exquisite tourist trap. Despite visiting 3 national sites in a day and holding our National Park Pass, we ended up spending more money in three days than we did the whole week we were in Seattle.

The morning began at Wind Cave National Park. As luck should have it despite being late we managed to weasal our way onto a tour, making it just in time to hear introductions from our ranger guide, who herself was fourtunatly late at 38 weeks. A big mound of pregnancy didn't hold her back from hiking the cave with us. Wind Cave holds 95% of the world's box formations, which look somewhat like you're picturing, only more spectacular. Difficult to explain and harder to capture on film, the boxes were named due to their resemblence of Post Office mailboxes. Long before preservation of the cave became the main priority visitors even left notes in these boxes.

We completed the Natural Entrance tour ($9 and worth every penny) with a large group of travelers from all over the U.S. and had lots of fun getting to know each other and calling out every time there was a low ceiling or jagged wall. It was incredible.

In the afternoon Mount Rushmore loomed in the distance. We decided to pay for parking rather than getting pictures from the side of the road. If you have a low tolerance for crowds and a powerful zoom on your camera you could skip going in. It is amazing though, enough to sit and marvel at, which the shoulder of a highway probably won't allow for.

We jumped on a 30 minute tour and learned the following about Mount Rushmore's construction: Rushmore was no more than a well liked visitor to the town of Keystone and so the mountain had its name well before its transformation into a monument. I can think of no other piece of art that had such blatant aims at tourism. When they were raising funds for the project of getting people into SD Mr. Rushmore became with $500,000 the project's greatest donor. Building the massive sculpture required 400 workers (with plenty of contruction experience but no artistic inclinations) and a man named Borglum at the helm. That and 14 years.

It was quite humbling to see Mount Rushmore in all it's glory and it's hard to say why but it really made the trip feel more real. Like Old Faithful before it Mount Rushmore is so iconic that once you are face to face with it you can't help but feel you are gazing at history, gazing at America.

(I guess its a bit like finally seeing in person someone you've only seen in pictures. Like maybe someone you've been talking with over the Internet. Only when you meet them and find that they weigh a ton and are made of stone, you are impressed)

Exiting the park we took a different route through Custer and found an altogether different landscape. We drove with spires curling into the sky on either side of the road and squeezed through several one lane tunnels, one so narrow we had to stop and fold in the side view mirrors before proceeded through it.

Despite this part of the drive and what we were to see tomorrow, when comared to the Badlands, Custer Park can safely be skipped. We drove back to Wind Cave to backcountry camp, making our tent in the dark and trying our best to avoid possible rattlesnakes. Forgoing the air mattress we got to actually spend a night roughing it and though succesful in dodging snakes we didn't in the dark avoid a hill slant and mattress of weeds. And so rough it was.