We jammed a lot into the past few days…with every next thing being bigger than the last.  

First we went to Mount Rushmore, approaching from the south on the Needles Highway.  We climbed onto the TOP of the first granite tunnel for our first peek of the big four dudes.  Probably not a climb that is sanctioned or that will win us Parents of the Year awards.  But after Charlie taught the kids that everything good is after the “do not enter, danger ahead” signs, our kids didn’t understand why we were even worrying about climbing up a boulder over a road, when there wasn’t even a danger sign anywhere to be found.

Once we got to Rushmore, we hiked around the quick path and Maya earned her third Junior Ranger badge, and then we were off to Crazy Horse.  Frankly, I think Crazy Horse is the more interesting of the two, since it’s planned to be about 3 times as high and is only using private funds.  But that’s a weird comparison since they are both just mind-boggling in their scale.  I mean can you imagine….dude comes home to his wife in the 19’teens and says, “Hey, I think I’ll carve four heads out of the mountain, about 60 feet tall each, what do you think?”  Actually, their torsos were part of the original plan, so it was even crazier than that.  

The next day we went to Wind Cave and the Mammoth dig site.  Have you ever heard of Wind Cave National Park?  Yeah, neither had we.  It turns out to be the 6th National Park…but we all agreed that while it was cool, there’s a reason no one has really heard of it.  It was neat, but hey, we grew up with Mammoth Cave in our back yard, so a cave is kind of eh.  

However, the Mammoth Dig site….whoa!!! About 40 years ago, a local developer was working on turning some land into a neighborhood development and they hit something suspicious…which turned out to be bone, and not just any bone, but the bones of a mammoth.  They called off the housing development and kept digging and so far have found SIXTY PLUS mammoth skeletons.  Most are Columbian, some are wooly.  Interestingly, wooly mammoths aren’t that big…only about as big as an Asian elephant.  More FAKE NEWS apparently.  😉  The Columbian mammoths were a lot bigger…13 feet tall.  The whole site was really interesting and a little overwhelming. 

On the way home to Custer we saw a really pretty pronghorn about 25 yards from the car, and then a whole herd of ELK!  Apparently they are pretty shy so you don’t spot them that often.  They come out more at dawn and dusk.  We were heading through Custer about 7pm and that was the lucky hour because about 30 of them were heading through the woods about 100 yards from our car.   We’ve loved seeing all the wildlife.  Earlier in the day we stopped to see some prairie dogs and one has apparently gotten quite used to all the traffic because he came right up to us.  He practically ate grass from our hands.  (More award-winning parenting going on here……)