A Very Active Week in South Dakota - Part 1 National Monuments and Memorials

We embarked on an early summer trip to celebrate our son's 5th grade graduation (onto middle school), satiate our thirst for nature and adventure and to stretch our legs out in Western South Dakota and Wyoming. The United States is blessed with seemingly endless wide open spaces to take in the beauty of this country and these two states are places we had never visited, but heard much about.

We often hike and walk in nature locally, but we were yearning for something a bit more emphatically focused on hiking and scenic drives when this trip was planned. We've made hiking and driving focused trips to Michigan (2017), North Carolina (2019), Kentucky (2020), Tennessee (2021) and Nevada/Utah (2022), but it had been a bit since we decided to embark on an adventure like this.

Here is an overview, play by play style, of our amazing week in South Dakota and Wyoming. I hope you can take something from my experience to take with you onto yours.

There was enough that we took in during our journey that I broke this post into 2 separate articles with this one focused on our visits to National Monuments and Memorials. An upcoming post will focus on our experiences at State and National Parks.

After flying into Rapid City and picking up our Turo rented car, we headed directly towards Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

We made the 40 or so minute drive from Rapid City Airport directly to the Front Porch restaurant in Keystone for a quick lunch of Dakota appropriate fare, buffalo and elk burgers, before heading to Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

You see the pictures and maybe wonder, I did, whats the point of seeing this in person? How much better can it look? As they often say, you need to see it to really appreciate it and this statement definitely fits the bill when it comes to Mount Rushmore. Its amazing that this was even created to start with. I can't imagine this happening in the modern day given the level of financial and bi-partisan work that would be required across many terms and administrations. Constructed over 14 years between 1927 and 1941 with an ending coinciding with WWII, this memorial really is something. Everything I saw, including the scale of it, the dedication and follow through, and the ambition of it are an emphatic statement of American optimism, our appetite for grandiosity, perseverance and a grinder mentality. This is a true world wonder and it has brought and continues to help to drive employment and the economy in this region.

We did the 20-30 minute (.6 mile) Presidential Trail hike to take in the best views and appreciate the surrounding forest. From this trail, we were able to visit the Sculptors Studio and listen to a Park Ranger give an impassioned overview of the sites history. The Presidential Trail is manageable for most, but does have alot of stairs. If the Avenue of Flags, which takes you directly to a terrific viewing point with access to the visitor center, is more suitable, the view is nearly as good. Don't miss the short film at the Visitor Center or the exhibits.

After our visit, we took a one-hour, 1.5-mile out-and-back hike along the Blackberry Trail through vibrant green forest, sparkling rocks and unique trees of all sorts. It was a great way to dip our feet into the Black Hills National Forest—just a teaser for the many hikes we had planned in Custer State Park over the next few days. The trailhead is just a short walk across the main road from the Mount Rushmore parking lot.

As part of our experiences on the 2nd day of our vacation, we visited the Crazy Horse Memorial and the Indian Museum of North America. The experience was powerful and informative to say the least. I knew little about the amazing (and ongoing) project known as Crazy Horse or about the Lakota people. The museum is impressive with amazing art work, videos and historical artifacts. The story of the multi lifetime entire family commitment by the Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and his family to promote and educate others about the American Indian community is quite a story that I feel fortunate to now know at least

something about. Our visit to the museum and memorial was highlighted by a captivating Lakota family dance performance — hoop dance included — leaving all of us feeling lucky to have experienced something so impactful.

Day 3 was dedicated to Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. The day started with an amazing, stunning 2 hour drive from Custer via Newcastle to Devils Tower, Wyoming. The open West really expanded as we got into Wyoming and experienced varied colors and terrain from green to red rocks and saw lots of animals along the way. I've taken alot of drives in alot of different places and this one is up there with the best.

Animal sightings during our Devils Tower visit included magpie birds, a bald eagle, snakes, lots of prairie dogs (see picture below), pronghorn and a wild turkey we spotted crossing the road. The amount of multi colored horses we saw in ranches roadside was notable, with even more cows that looked to be quite satisfied. We got close enough to some of the cows to see their brands — a key way ranches mark their livestock, since fences only go so far in keeping things sorted.

We knocked out two solid hikes at Devils Tower National Monument, including the 2.8-mile Red Beds Trail—a moderate loop that circles much of the tower. This trail delivered stunning up-close views of the massive rock columns, giving us a real sense of their raw power and geological beauty. What really stole the show, though, was the striking contrast between the fiery red rocks and the lush green pastures—an almost surreal landscape that felt straight out of another world.

The Joyner Ridge trail was a nice contrast to the Red Bends Trail since it's a bit further out and takes you on an easier, relatively flat hike through a grassy valley for a 1.5 mile loop which allows you to appreciate the vastness of this monument from a bit further out.

Devils Tower is well known for being featured in the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was formed when magma pushed through rock layers millions of years ago and then cooled, hardened and contracted. It then fractured into columns, much like mud cracks In a drying puddle. The Towers extraordinary 4 to 7 sided columms are the largest and longest (some more than 200 feet long and 8 feet wide) natural rock columns in the world.

This is an amazing site from a 20 minute drivers vantage point away and gets more stunning the closer you get. It's like something from another world and is the most unique and otherworldly natural physical structure I've seen with my own eyes since my visit to the Australian outback in 2002 when I saw Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock). This 867 foot tower is America's first National Monument (1906). Its popular with rock climbers and is spiritually significant to many indigenous people.

Part of Day 6 of our trip was dedicated to Jewel Cave National Monument. With over 200 miles of mapped underground passages, this is one of the longest known caves in the world. The deepest point in the cave is 600 feet below ground with an elevation range from 4600 to 5400 feet (800 feet from its lowest to highest point). President Theodore Roosevelt declared Jewel Cave a National Monument in 1908 (though exploration continued and is still ongoing) and some of the unique features of the cave include draperies and frost work (when water containing calcium carbonate evaporates and forms aragonite crystals). The draperies (some look like jellyfish and others that are called cave bacon look like long slabs of bacon) are particularly interesting. This type of cave formation is formed when mineral rich water seeps through cracks in the cave ceiling or wall. We did a very interesting ranger led 90 minute tour which was mind boggling, a feast for the eyes and extremely informative. Walking beneath the earth will always be humbling to me.