Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Mt. Rushmore or Bust!

Nicholas and I took the 6ish hour drive up to Mt. Rushmore this past weekend and camped in the Black Hills National Forest for a night. On Friday morning we started our journey and realized how expansive the great expanse of Wyoming really is.
Along the way we found a lovely little home we were very interested in putting an offer on.Once we arrived at our campsite we setup our lovely tent and got ready to settle down for the day. When we got to the pumping up of the air mattress, we discovered there was a pretty good sized hole in the top portion of it. We can only assume that this was the work of Jen and Kacey as they were the last ones to use it. We had some time before we wanted dinner, so we treked around the campsite for a bit and took some scenic pictures.
As we were getting a little hungry, we decided to start the fire to cook our foil dinners...but that was unsuccessful as well. We ended up cooking hot dogs on the propane stove we brought and I discovered that I don't really like hot dogs all that much. The lack of fire did encourage however the viewing of stars, so my little astronomer setup his telescope and we looked at stars for a while.Once we got tired, we decided to, in spite of the lack of padding and protection between us and the ground, sleep in the tent. Things went well until about 5am when we got so cold we decided to move into the car.
The next day we got up and Nick made me some sausage, eggs, and hot chocolate for breakfast. After we got packed up for the day we headed off to Custer, SD for some needed supplies. It's a quaint little town with a skate park, supermarket, and Ace Hardware which was our main stop of the morning. Oh, there is also a very successful oil and gas company in the town.


After all our sightseeing we made it over to the grand mountain! We discovered a unique trait of mine: I would MUCH rather pay an entrance fee than pay for parking. An annual parking pass for the park was $10 and everything else was free, but it just drove me nuts knowing that I paid for my car to sit in a structure when I would have gladly paid $10 to see what I came to see. Anyway, we got there, and toured around for a few hours. It was a really neat experience. Here are some pictures we took to document it:
This is Nick's impression of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore.
I am such a child, but Nick is the finger in the picture, so it appears that after some coaxing I am able to corrupt him too. Sorry Laurie that I am undoing all your hard work at refining him!
"I am America, and so Can You!" -Stephen T. Colbert
This was taken along the Presidential Trail around the front base of the mountain. After we got back to the campsite, some rain began to fall, so we went in the tent for a nap. We were awoken by harder rain, thunder, and lightning. We decided that instead of not being able to start a fire for dinner that night and sleeping in the car we would just drive home and sleep in our bed. It was a really fun trip, slightly shorter and wetter than we expected, but a great way to start off a new semester!

2 comments:

Lauren Davison said...

That is quite the adventure!! I rather enjoyed the nose picking picture, by the way. A little bit of corruption is funny... ;)

Nelson Family said...

Yay for camping trips! Next time you go, you should go exploring in the badlands, great fun. Love the pictures!