Mt Rushmore, Rapid city & Deadwood SD

Several different shots of Mount Rushmore. Over the visitor center. Mount Rushmore represents the biggest work of art on earth. Each face is 60 ft high and would fit on a man that is 465 ft tall.
Close up and personal (as you can get)
Through one of the tunnels along the route to the park.
Through the trees from a distance.
Profile of President Washington.
Rapid City S D has a parade of presidents in their downtown district. Currently they have 27 US Presidents in bronze dressed as they would have been in their time. They plan to complete all the presidents and add to them as they leave office. Below is President Kennedy and John Jr.
President Martin Van Buren -just to show a couple of different eras.
Deadwood S D has a lot of history not the least of it the gold discovered there. There are numerous old buildings as shown below as well as the history of Wild Bill Hickok & Calamity Jane.
This building is the original one (rebuilt due to a fire in the late 1800"s) that the famous card game was played out that precipitated the killing of Wild Bill.

This is Back Bar has been in this salon since 1925 and is made of cherry wood. It is beautiful, see below.
Following are the signs regarding the killing of Wild Bill as well as his and Calamity Jane's graves with the signs put up by the city.

The card game.
Wild Bill statue was done in 1991.

Calamity Jane -stories had it that she was Bill's girlfriend - but it was only stories as he was said to be only a friend of hers. But that is why she made the request noted on her sign below.

windcave & wounded knee

Wind cave is one of the worlds oldest caves and is 125 miles of caves that circle back around and over itself. It is the only cave that has "box works" type formations. Temp is usually about 50 degrees- on hot days it really feels good. The hole next to the ranger is the original hole that explorers went through. She said you only need a hole as big as your widest bones as the rest will squish to fit.
Below is a sample of the "box works" found on the ceilings of the caves.
Barb in the tunnel.

There are hundreds of tunnels and unexplored areas. Some are deep as this one some go straight up.This is a sample of the dog tooth crystals.
Another sample of the beauty of the caves.
We visited Wounded Knee but found only the double sided sign and a cemetery. The cemetery was for the massacred as well as present day people.

Lead & Spearfish S D with Aladdin Wy. tossed in.

The Homestake Mine was a very large open cut mine in Lead South Dakota. This locomotive was used to bring the ore to the surface.
A bit about the mine and the amount of ore and depth of the mine.
A look down inside the open cut from as close as we could get.
This is one of the gears that was used in the mine to hoist 37.5 million tons of ore between 1950 and 1994 from a depth of 5000 ft.
A few across part of Lead S D from the mine site.

We stayed in the Spearfish City Park Campgrounds and they are connected to a hatchery also. They have some very large trout. This could be Bill's favorite place to fish - if they would let him.
This is part of their grounds with fish in the water and ducks on the island.
Someone above was feeding the fish and they went into a feedig frenzy.
This is one of the larger ones swimming away, notice how broad it is. Bill's only question was "I wonder how big the fine." He would love to catch some this size.
These are a couple of side shots of some of the bigger Rainbow Trout.
On one of our drives we discovered an old town called Aladdin. As seen by the sign there are 15 people that live here. The store is 107 years old and has a little of everything in it, as you can see by the antiques below.
This is an old freezer converted to shelves for sale items.

This is an old switchboard - can you imagine using this now?

S Dakota & Wyoming - Crazy Horse - devils tower

The sign tells the story of Devils Tower but not the Indian legend. Some small Indian girls were playing a game nearby when a bear chased them. They climbed on the 3 ft rock and begged the rock to save them. It started growing and the marks you see on the tower are the bear clawing after them as it raised to 1267 feet above the Belle Fourche River.
The tower from a distance. It is very impressive.
The Native People consider this a sacred place and come here to pray leaving prayer clothes tied to the trees as show in the second photo bleow.

This is a view from of the valley from as high up as we could go without doing an actual rock climb. Which in one of the photos below it appears Bill is attempting. I of course have to remain to take the photos--lucky me.
Another shot of the whole Tower.
This one needs to be double clicked to see the people that are actually doing the climbing. They are about a fourth the way up.
This is some climbers on the backside that are almost at the top of the tower. When they actually made the top they were around the corner and we could no longer see them. It is about the size of a football field sort of rounded at the top, not totally flat.
Here you can see some folks about half way up. They are not the ones who made it all the way up. There were about 8 to 10 climbers. Annually there are about 4 to 5,000 climbers.
Here Bill is attempting his climb. He did not get to much further and it was time to go.
This is the statue of Crazy Horse not to far form Mt Rushmore. Internet info=

Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear officially started Crazy Horse Memorial June 3, 1948. The Memorials mission is to honor the culture, tradition and living heritage of North American Indians. The memorial consists of the mountain carving, the Indian Museum of North America, and the Native American Cultural center. The monument is being carved out of Thunderhead Mountain on land considered sacred by some Native Americans. The sculpture's final dimensions will be 641 f t wide & 563 f t high. By comparison, the heads of Mt. Rushmore are 60 ft high; the head of Crazy Horse will be 87 feet high. The hole is the start of the underside of the arm as seen in the sculpture below.

This shows both the sculpture left by Korczak and the mountain being carved. His family is carrying on the completion of the work. This is all being done by private donations.
The bronze sculpture in the museum is in the foreground.
This is a shot of the mountain between the statues arm and the horse. This symbolizes Crazy Horse saying"My lands are where my dead lie buried." The feather on top his head will be added when the rest of the carving is done. Want more info - go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial