There are some monumental things to see in USA. Some of them are truly on the way to nowhere… just so damn far out of the way, they’re a real schlep to reach. Incorporating Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park or the Devil’s Tower into your average holiday trip to the USA is a stretch. After a slow start to our time in USA, we’re making the effort to see as many USA monuments as we can, but winter’s coming and some places will soon become inaccessible. So the race is on…
Cold War and Badlands
We leave Sioux Falls westwards. Crossing South Dakota, we try our best to stay off the main highways. Cuthbert only cruises comfortably at 80kph/50mph so we gain little from sitting on the Interstate highways with the monster-mega-trucks. The cross-country dirt roads are in good condition and for us they’re just as fast as the highways. They tend to be more interesting too. The big skies and open horizons are really a sight to see!
Monuments, Big Skies and Dirt Roads across the Prairies of South Dakota
Eventually, around 2,000km west of Detroit where we entered USA, we arrived at the National Minuteman Missile Site.
The Minuteman Missile Site is a ‘National Historic Site’ telling the tale of US Cold War defences. Yup… Historic. Eeiisshh! Some of this stuff happened in our lifetime! We grew-up in the 1960s/70s and lived in the divided Germany of the 1980s, so I guess that makes us ‘historic’ too 😊. Anyway, the museum tells the ‘big picture’ of the escalation of the Cold War; not just the technical side, but the wider social and political aspect too. The Ranger, as a retired USAF Officer who spent his career working the missile launch system, brings to life the story of day-to-day existence at the ‘sharp-end’ of the US Cold War defences. It’s a cool, educational place and great to visit, even if you’re not yet historic like us.
Very close to the Minuteman Site is the fabulously scenic Badlands National Park. We’d seen lots of great overlanding photos of this park and been looking forward to seeing it for ourselves. What else can we say? A picture paints a thousand words…
Badlands scenery
Monumental Heads
Leaving Badlands we head, guess what… west again! Another Bucket List spot for us is Mount Rushmore – those Presidents’ heads carved into the mountain. The potential problem with Bucket List places is that their magnificence builds-up in your mind to the extent that reality can disappoint. For us, Mount Rushmore was probably a wee bit smaller in scale on the cliff-face than we had expected. But the overall impressiveness of the monument only grew in our minds after learning the detail of how it was achieved. How those guys hung off the cliff on ropes to blast the rock, and their attention to detail in chiselling the stone is truly astonishing. It’s not just astonishing for its time over a hundred years ago; such an achievement would still be astonishing if it were executed today. And looking at the risks they took, it’s even more impressive to learn that nobody died in the process.
Like Badlands, most people wouldn’t casually drop by to see Mount Rushmore in passing. But if you make the effort to reach it, slap-bang in the middle of the USA, you’ll find there is other stuff of interest in the vicinity. If you’re interested in US Presidential stuff, you’ll find in the nearby town of Rapid City a cool bronze life-size statue of every US President so far. Wander down Main and St Joseph’s streets you’ll find on every corner, a guy who sat in the great office. Obama is the most recent, but plans are apparently already afoot to add Trump.
A Monumental Crazy Horse in Progress
Just down the road from Mount Rushmore is another spectacular monument that we weren’t even aware of until we got to the area and looked at the local blurb. Back in 1947, sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski accepted the challenge of carving a monument to the indigenous people of North America and their story in American history. It’s a long and interesting story on which Mr Google can inform you further if it piques your interest, but the upshot is that Lakota Chief Crazy Horse (who had led the Lakota warriors to defeat General Custer at Little Bighorn) was chosen as the poster-boy to represent his people on the mountainside.
Done so far… 
… and the plan
Korczak made it his life’s work to design and start carving the monument. On his death in 1982 the programme was continued by his wife and now his children. So far they’ve done his face and hacked-away the mountain for the basis of his body and horse. The profile face that you can see on the top is 87ft 6in high. When the whole monument is complete, it will be 563ft high and 641ft long! The design and progress of the work can be seen in the photos, but the impressive programme is far wider than simply creating a monument for posterity. It includes educational and other opportunities for the next generations of the indigenous people. The sculpture is a very, very, very long work-in-progress, but they’re sticking with it!
The Monumental Centre
Just up the road from Mount Rushmore, well… quite a way up the road actually, but it’s all relative 😉, is a small monument to the geographical centre of the USA. The exact point is a few kilometres away in a field on private land, so the monument sits in the nearby town of Belle Fourche. Reaching this spot brings home to us just how vast this country is. We’ve been driving west for days and days and days, we didn’t even start at the coast (we started this leg in Detroit, Michigan), yet we have still only just reached the middle of the USA :-0!
A Monumental Plug
Onwards west again, into a new state for us… Wyoming. Here we’re looking for another monument: Devil’s Tower. Remember the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Well, this is the place.
This giant volcanic plug stands out on the skyline for many miles on the Wyoming plains. From a distance it looks like a featureless bit of rock, but on closer inspection you can see the amazing detail of the smaller rock-columns that form the mountain. Hiking the trails around the base shows the detail in different lights and it’s a fascinating spectacle. It’s easy to see why it’s a sacred and spiritual place for the indigenous people.
West Again???
For the next leg, we find that our commitment to woefully limited planning is causing us a bit of a disappointment. We had kind of hoped to push further west across Wyoming to Yellowstone National Park – another Bucket List spot for us. A brief check on-line a while ago had showed that yes indeed, the park is open over winter. It’s cold (very cold in fact) and snowy, but it looked spectacular in the snow and ice. We have a capable vehicle (we’ve done winter temperatures in the Yukon at -31C during lock-down) so the conditions didn’t bother us too much and we were looking forward to it.
But as we got further across Wyoming and closer to the Park, we did a bit more reading on-line… bugger! It seems that Yellowstone had closed until mid-December to prepare the park for the winter season! Hmmmmm. We wanted to see Old Faithful and the rest of the park. But sitting around northern Wyoming for over 3 weeks in November/December waiting for the park to re-open was a big ask. We had already done everything else we wanted to do in that part of the world, so the wait would be interminable!
Reluctantly we concluded that the westward push to Yellowstone would end for now; we would turn left, southbound. It was always the aim to go down to the sunshine for winter, we had just hoped to squeeze in a quick jaunt around Yellowstone beforehand. Oh well… the Park will still be here in the spring, so we can come north again and see it then.
In the meantime, we’re heading down to another new state for us. Next blog will feature the spectacular Colorado!!