Day 4 (part 2) Mt. Rushmore

Keystone, South Dakota, is the town closest to Mt Rushmore. The population of Keystone is 311 as reported by the welcome sign. An interesting tourist town, clean and crowded with buildings crammed between steep stone hills that have pine trees battling to get their roots into the ground between all those rocks. It is pretty, amusing, and has only one street down the middle, that is all there is room for.

Mt Rushmore is 2 miles up the forested stone hills from Keystone. The facility is new and impressive, multi-layered parking garage, and a granite building with stone walkways leading to the Presidents. It is a well designed building, looks like Mt Rushmore brings in lots of money. In the parking lot there were license plates from many different states, but only one from OR that I saw, mine.

It was raining and foggy while we were there, indeed, I had to wait a few minutes for the mist to clear and reveal the stone faces. I have seen many pictures of Mt Rushmore, and I had the impression that the Presidents were larger than they are. They are good looking alright, just not as big as I thot they were. Also, I am lucky it was raining. Wet rocks always look different than when dry. The Presidents had richer, more color intense complexions than in the pictures I have seen. The whole area is beautiful, I liked it.