Today we went to Mt. Rushmore. Boy, is it impressive! But first, we moved to Hart Ranch Resort just outside of Rapid City, SD. What a nice place. The campground has grass and trees, a large pool, plus many other amenities. Paddy got us a special three night deal in exchange for our sitting through a sales presentation on Sunday. They are part of a national (they say international) organization of campgrounds. You buy into this one and get access (possibly with a discount) to other campgrounds in the network. We’ve looked at these deals before but haven’t bought into one yet.


I loved Mt. Rushmore. It’s much higher above the viewing area than I expected. We went to the museum and saw how it was done with models and pointers magnified by 10 times (1 foot from a model equals 10 feet on the mountain).

We took a scenic drive southeast of Mt. Rushmore and went through some tight tunnels carved into the mountain. On a couple of them we were able to see the faces through the tunnel. Very cool.

An interesting observation: in the woods for miles around Mt. Rushmore someone has cleared the brush into neat little piles. Who does this? How many people does it take – it goes for many miles? Why do they do it? It’s a mystery we can’t answer. We used to be friends with a woman who highly valued "tidy forests." Maybe she's not the only one?