Tuesday, June 2, 2020
On Tuesday morning my first stop was the Chapel in the Hills (another recommendation from “Off the Beaten Path.”) This is a delightful little place, tucked away at the edge of a residential area at 3788 Chapel Lane. The word for this place is charming. (It is also a word I rarely use – just seems girly to me – but there it is.) It is small, Norwegian, and absolutely beautiful. It gets a little kitschy at the gift shop, but otherwise it is really absolutely (here it comes again) charming. The place serves as a venue for worship, meditation, and weddings (assuming you have a small wedding party.) The setting is gorgeous, and includes a well-maintained meditation path through beautiful pine trees. Very much worth the time to see. When I say it is Norwegian, I’m not kidding. It is a stavkirke (stave church) that replicates the Borgund Stavkirke in Norway. The gift shop is in a stabbur (a wooden cabin with a sod roof.) If you allow two hours you can see the highlights; three or four hours will permit you spend some time in the meditation garden and take some nice photos.
When I finished up at the Chapel in the Hills, I headed back toward Mount Rushmore. (Mount Rushmore is located at 13000 SD-244 in Keystone, South Dakota.) I really wanted to see the monument and grounds in daylight, and get as close as I could for photos. I had to pay for parking this time (it was free the previous evening, and the lot was less than 15% filled.) On this Tuesday, it was paid admission and – even amid the COVID-19 craziness – looked as though it was about 50% filled. One of the park rangers on duty that day told me there weren’t really any guided tours, but there is a well-marked trail and signage along the way up to the base of the sculpture where the tailings from the sculpting have come to rest. There is, indeed! I and about a hundred other tourists walked along that trail and ascended the 258 steps to the spot he described. The scenery along the climb was quite beautiful, with overlooks and benches for us older and less robust folks at generous intervals. Park rangers ascended and descended the trail regularly as well, making sure everything was, as the Brits would say, “tickety-boo.” Photos really do not do justice to marvels like this. The figures of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt are more than 60 feet high and carved in the granite face of the mountain. Places like Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, and the Grand Canyon simply cannot reveal their depth and grandeur in photographs. But I do think a couple of my photos – as well as many, many others done by much more skilled photographers – reflect some of the incredible craftsmanship and artistry of the master sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln. It is simply awe-inspiring. The memorial park is comprised of 1,278 acres and the sculpture was done between 1927 and 1941.
Another monument I had visited briefly on that trip over 50 years before was the developing sculpture of Crazy Horse, at the Crazy Horse Memorial situated in the Black Hills on privately held land. It is located in Custer County, and its address is merely Crazy Horse, South Dakota. You really can’t miss it. Envisioned to be even grander than the figures on Rushmore, the face of Crazy Horse is 83 feet tall. In fact, the entire sculpture is designed to be 641 feet in length and 563 feet high. The Crazy Horse Memorial is still under construction, and honestly doesn’t seem to me to have progressed much over the last 50 years. This is no doubt owing to the funding model, since it is operated by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit organization, and relies entirely on donations. When completed, it is to depict the Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski. Although Ziolkowski has passed on in 1982, his children and grandchildren continue the project – albeit at a pace that leads me to conclude that it will never be finished. I was quite impressed by the Native American museum at the site, and very pleased by the solicitousness of the staff there. There is a short movie available that explains the purpose and the history of the memorial and describes the work that has been done by the Ziolkowski family to bring it along. There are opportunities to observe the work “up close,” too. The day I visited there were van rides available for tourists to ascend to the ongoing work site. But at $120 per passenger, I decided to pass. I opted instead to shoot photos from the main plaza with my longest lens. There is the requisite gift / souvenir shop, of course. I stopped for lunch at the café there, and found both the food and service excellent, actually the best part of my visit!
From the Crazy Horse Memorial, I pushed on to one of my favorite spots in all of South Dakota; the Needles Highway. But between these two intended destinations, I discovered – yes, I imagine you’ve guessed it by now – backroads dotted by more abandoned ranch and farm buildings. This stretch also included a Conestoga style wagon, several old automobiles, and some vintage tractors.
The Needles Highway is part of an incredibly beautiful 38-mile drive through the Black Hills on South Dakota Highway 87. The vistas are absolutely stunning, the primary roads are paved, and the park rangers at the Custer State Park end of the drive are exceptionally helpful and accommodating. The needles Highway, along with US 16A, are part of what is called the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway. If you enjoy the beauty of nature, particularly stark and rocky landscapes, DO NOT miss the Needles Highway. The Needles Highway part of the drive is 14 miles long. It was named after the huge granite “needle” formations that the highway darts through, and includes two very narrow tunnels (the Needles Eye and the Iron Creek tunnels) in the route. My little pickup truck fit through the Needles Eye with only 18 inches or so to spare on each side. The drive includes plentiful turnouts for shutterbugs and gawkers, and my advice is to take advantage of every single one. The vistas will take your breath away. If you just want to drive it to say that you’ve seen it, allow yourself about 90 minutes. If you like this kind of thing as much as I do, allow yourself half a day. If you expect to clamber around in the rocks (as I frequently do), take plenty of water to drink and a first aid kit. Some folks also recommend a snake bite kit, though I have never needed one (yet.) Also, make sure you have sturdy shoes. These large, jagged rocks are unforgiving and their surfaces – especially during or after any rain as well as along waterfalls – can be treacherous.
Emerging from the Needles Highway, the road sort of poured me out into a grassy plain where I encountered a large and truly mangy bison. I stopped and chatted with him a bit, attempting to get him to raise his head so that I could photograph him from the comfort and relative personal safety of my truck. It was as though I’d awakened a grumpy old man from his sleep. An stringy assortment of weeds hung from one side of his head as he glared at me, and I’m pretty sure the message he was sending me was something like: “I have these big horns here, and I am more than willing to use them. Move along, buster!” So as soon as I got my photo, that’s exactly what I did.
