USA Guide
The Great Plains
Mount Rushmore National Memorial
The Mount Rushmore National Memorial, originally dubbed "The Shrine of Democracy," is the linchpin of the Hills' tourist circuit. It's an easy 24-mile drive southwest of Rapid City, though by far the most impressive approach is to take Iron Mountain Road (US-16A) from Custer State Park, which runs for seventeen miles up and over 5500ft Iron Mountain.
In 1923, state historian Doane Robinson and the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, known for carvings such as the leaders of the Confederacy in Stone Mountain, Georgia, talked over the possibility of turning the imposing fingers of granite known as the Needles into a dramatic patriotic sculpture. They discussed depictions of such heroic figures of the West as Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Jim Bridger. Borglum opted for a nearby mountain named after New York attorney Charles E. Rushmore, upon which he would fashion the faces and heads of four certifiably great American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Borglum's buddy, Theodore Roosevelt.
Borglum talked, dreamed, and worked big. "American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life," he opined. Sixty when the project began in 1927, he died fourteen years later, $200,000 in debt, just a few months prior to the dedication of the last head – Roosevelt's – in 1939. Inclement weather and uncertain funding had meant that the actual sculpting took about six and a half years, at a total cost of $993,000.
The Big Four gaze out impassively, cheek by jowl, arguably a greater engineering feat than an artistic one. Each head is about sixty feet from chin to crown – by way of comparison, the Statue of Liberty's head is only seventeen feet. Lincoln, Borglum's favourite, has an eighteen-foot-long nose and the glint in each eleven-foot-wide eye is thirty inches.
The best time to view Rushmore is dawn or dusk, when there are fewer people and better lighting. Although there is no admission charge, a $10 parking fee has been introduced since the construction of a multilevel parking lot and high-tech visitor center. The café here, complete with panoramic windows, as seen in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, serves full meals and "Monumental Breakfasts" of hash browns, eggs, country-fried steak with gravy, and a biscuit piled on one plate.
Opening time: Daily: summer 8am–10pm; rest of year 8am–5pm
Price: Free, parking $10