My grandfather, who is 93, is being taken care of by my parents, and one of the things they asked him to do was figure out what his “bucket list” was. One thing he had said was what he had always wanted to do was go see Mount Rushmore. So, that’s what we ended up doing this past week was we drove out to South Dakota. I took a bunch of pictures, almost 400, and thought I'd share a couple that I thought turned out well.
Since we didn’t want to get out of the car much on our way through the Badlands since it was so hot (it was about 110-112 that day there), I only got a couple at a rest area:
The first day we were there, we drove up into the mountains to go see Mount Rushmore. The landscape there was really something to see! Unfortunately there was a fair amount of dead trees because of the drought and the mountain pine beetles, but there was still a bunch of green. The rocks that were a part of the mountain that stuck out of the ground were really cool looking.
Then, we got into Mount Rushmore, and we got a few pictures
My grandfather and I at the overlook area
A couple of the above pictures were taken on the Presidential Path (or Trail… I can’t seem to remember at the moment). This was a 250 stair trail that went up into the mountain side in from of the monument. I went up by myself, and got some of those pictures, and these below
On Tuesday, we went to Keystone (which is the area where Mount Rushmore is), and we rode what is called the 1880 Train. This is a steam powered train that takes you 10 miles west, to a place called Hill City. This was probably my grandfather’s favorite part of the trip, he talked about it the entire rest of the trip!
While we were waiting for the train to take off from Keystone, my mom said I should take a picture of grandpa through the window of the train from outside. He decided to pose a little
Thursday, we then went to Custer State Park. This is another place out in the mountains, and it took quite a long time to get to it through winding mountain roads, with no cell phone reception, and spotty GPS signals. We decided to stop on the top of one of the mountains, and see if we could find a place to eat the lunch we brought. This is the view from where we ate.
This was a small part of the little gazebo type thing we had our lunch in. It had a picnic table about 4 foot from the drop off that’s in the pictures above
After we got finished eating, we went through the actual wildlife area. My grandfather had been talking about buffalo the entire time we had been on this trip, so this trip was to see if we could see any wild buffalo. Anyhow, we did.
On our way back to Ohio, we stopped at a rest area in Iowa at the Missouri River. It had a really cool lookout at the top of the hills by the river, and I got a few pictures there as well:
And, out of everything we saw, this was what, next to corn fields, we saw the most of:
