I’ve been to a lot of National and State Parks in the US, but for some reason, Mt Rushmore and the state of South Dakota had eluded me. I guess I just assumed that it was really far away. Living in Colorado, near Denver at the time, I decided to check out the driving distance one day and was amazed that it was only going to be about a 7-hour drive. Finding a friend who wanted to go with me was easy, so we grabbed my dog, packed up the car and off we went for a few days.

I’m pretty spontaneous, and it was “off-season” but I decided to book a campsite ahead of time, just to be safe.

We drove north through Wyoming and then cut slightly east into South Dakota. There isn’t a lot to see until you actually get into Custer State Park. This is the largest state park with 71,000 acres and over 1300 bison. Driving through the rolling hills with roaming bison everywhere was just mesmerizing! There are plenty of places to pull over but many people were just stopped on the road – due to bison crossing. I’ve always loved these majestic creatures, so seeing them up close was just wonderful.

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In addition to the bison, we came across a section of the drive that had wild donkeys everywhere and like the bison, they really didn’t care if you were on the road or not. We weren’t in a hurry, so that wasn’t the problem, but they came right up to the car and stuck their heads in – which surprised us and really freaked out my dog – ha.

After all of this, getting to Mt Rushmore was almost anticlimactic – almost…

Driving to Mt Rushmore and seeing the monument from a distance was impressive, but up close was just amazing and we were fortunate to be visiting on a beautiful clear blue sky day.

There is no fee to enter the park but there is a $10 charge per car to park in the lot nearby. There are many trails in the area as well as an information center at the entrance with photos and videos explaining this project. The president heads are roughly 60 feet tall and carved out of granite and after learning about how this was done, I’m just impressed that it was even completed.

Crazy Horse is another enormous carving project going on that is close by. It was started in 1948 and is still in progress. When complete, it will be much larger than Mt Rushmore and will depict the Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, riding a horse and pointing in the distance.

Our campground was near Hot Springs, SD so we found some wonderful local restaurants there – one served their pancakes on hubcaps, they were huge!!

The last thing that we did before leaving this beautiful area, was to visit the Mammoth Site. This is an active excavation site that is partially enclosed and to date, 61 mammoth remains have been found here. This area was a prehistoric sinkhole that formed slowly and filled with sediment over many many years and houses the greatest concentration of mammoth remains in the world. I took some photos while I was there, but they just don’t do the site justice, so I won’t bother to add them – just go see for yourself.

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