Mount Rushmore

Our tour director is merciless. We had four national parks or monuments to visit today, and so we had to set an alarm.

Stopped at the last couple of overlooks in the Badlands NP as we climbed out of the valley, and took some pictures in the morning light which gives the rocks quite a different colour.

Just outside the park entrance was the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. Seems that there were over 450 Minuteman II missile sites nationwide, and most of them were deployed under the fields of Wyoming and South Dakota, I guess on the understanding that any strikes by the Russians on the sites with megaton warheads wouldn't affect any large cities. (I'm pretty sure that we all would have noticed 450 megatons of nuclear explosions wherever they took place, but I quibble.) Each of the 450 launch sites had a 1.2 megaton warhead which could be 'deployed' in less than 5 minutes and reach its USSR target in less than 30 minutes. In a reassuring move, in the nearby control facility, they made sure that two operators both agreed that the executive order was genuine and turned separate keys, before they plunged the world into a nuclear war.

We watched the movie about the program, and how they proudly destroyed the missiles as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in 1991 by Bush and Gorbachev, and returned the fields to the farmers. They kept the pair of the control facility and the launch facility that we visited as a memorial, as they were most typical and least altered.

We were feeling suitably reassured and safe with the thought that they had destroyed the 500 sites, and that there were no longer any active ICBM silos in South Dakota, till a small sentence at the bottom of the last page of the brochure mentioned in passing that there are still 500 nuclear missiles deployed in neighbouring states today. OK, so lets just put that in plain english for the rest of us. They destroyed 500 obsolete missiles at the end of the cold war as required by the treaty, then both countries promptly replaced them with the same number of newer and more powerful missiles which are active today. A sobering thought after a week of marvelling at the beauty and fragility of the national parks surrounding them.

It was back onto the I-90, and we retraced our steps to Rapid City where we stopped for coffee and petrol, then south to our next destination - Mount Rushmore. It's always a place I wanted to see, but wasn't quite sure what it would be like. Well, it was busier than I imagined. It had 4 multi level carparks to start with, just like a busy shopping centre carpark at Christmas. Then colour coded paths to the entrance just like at an airport. Just in case you had to wait too long in the viewing areas to get to the front of the crowd, there were also two signposted 'dog exercise areas'. However, the carved monuments are truly amazing, and the story of the huge instruments that Borglum used to get the angles and proportions right made interesting reading. If you don't know, the four presidents carved into the stone are Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and it took a team of 400 carvers 14 years to complete. Truly an amazing feat.

Then it was on to our third stop - Jewel Cave, named for the glittering jewel-like calcite crystals in the chambers. A different type of cave system to what we are used to. Very few stalagmites and stalactites, and relatively few large caverns compared to Australia. Lots and lots of Nailhead Spar in shafts and small passages, which elicited the most useless sentence in the English language from my well meaning wife - "Watch your head!" (think about it). The second longest cave system in the world, and only 5% or 170 miles mapped. Did one of the tours for an hour or so, having lunch while we waited for our tour time to arrive. Descended and ascended in elevators which is new for us.

The last stop for the day was 20 miles down the road at Wind Cave on their 6pm (and last) tour. Almost didn't happen, as we were stuck in roadworks on leaving Jewel Cave for about 20 minutes, and arrived with only one minute to spare. Somewhat different to Jewel Cave. Still small passages, but this time there was the largest collection of boxwork formations in the world, and lots of popcorn growths. There is only one small natural entrance just big enough to crawl through, and the volume of wind whistling in or out of the cave system (depending on the relative atmospheric pressures inside and outside) gave the cave it's name. Nowadays, of course, they have dynamited a hole fit for tourists, and installed an elevator, but still they have only mapped 140 miles, about 10% of the expected total of the passages.

When we emerged, we headed over to the campground, which is lovely and quiet, with a reasonably small number of people staying. On our last camping night, we sat out under the stars, lit a fire and toasted marshmallows. Not any marshmallows, mind you. Everything is bigger here. They are the size of cigarette packets, and the world record for chubby bunnies must be two. I defy anybody to chew more than two at a time.