Monday - 5-17-2021
I gained a day today because I was sure today was
Tuesday. That confused me until Joe got
me straightened out. We got a late
start, time to catch up on our rest a little so it was after 11:00 before we
really got started. We had breakfast in
town again so I could work on the blog, but it was taking so long to get the
pictures posted I finally gave up. I
will have to finish them tomorrow.
We headed to Crazy Horse first, saw 3 deer right beside the Road. Crazy Horse is definitely a work in progress, but very impressive. Dave and Mazie have been here at least twice and are anxious to see pictures of the progress that has been made since their last visit, which was in 2010.
We took the bus ride to get a view from the front. They are currently working on the knuckles on the hand. Their 5 to 10 year goal is to finish the hand.
This quite a nice complex, with lots of exhibits, a theater where we watched a short film, gift show, restaurant. They had an exhibit of the horse decked out in full Indian garb. The white is leather.
And, of course, a buffalo.
We ate lunch here. They have a statue of the finished project here and there is certainly a lot of detail to it.
From here, we drove past Mt. Rushmore into the touristy town of Keystone to the rock shop I buy my materials from. They had some beautiful stuff (the pictures don't do it justice). I settled on a half pound of Botswana agate that I want to tumble.
Right after we left here, I saw our first marmot of the trip. I made Joe turn around so he could see it. As we drove on, we saw two more right down the street.
We also stopped here at the wood carving shop, and I walked through it. Some very cool stuff.
My favorite was this one of bears on a rope, hanging on a tree limb. The picture doesn't do it justice. It was very cute.
There were two carvers at work. One was fine-tuning the nose on a bear.
We headed back to Mt. Rushmore. By now, it's 4:00 but it was only a few miles. It's kind of a long walk from the parking area to the lobby, and there is a lot of construction going on. We remembered the line of flags at the entrance. This isn't near as elaborate an exhibit as Crazy Horse.
We watched a short film here too, walked through the exhibits, skipped the gift shop, and finished up.
The only things left on our agenda today was to drive back through Custer State Park and see what animals we could see tonight. We took part of the curvy road again, then switched to the Needles Byway, where the ranger had said they sometimes see Big Horn rams. But we didn't see any. We didn't drive the whole Wildlife Loop tonight, but we did see some animals again. I resisted taking pictures of most of them, but we came upon a herd of about 25 elk that I couldn't resist. We spooked them, but they didn't go far, so we watched them for a while. Joe shut the motor off, and we coasted down the hill to get closer.
Moving on, we found a few turkeys (finally got a good picture), a few pronghorn antelope, and finally the buffalo with babies again. We pulled off and watched them for a while.
I mentioned the burnout here earlier but didn't take a picture. It is very sad, but we do see regrowth in some areas.
It started raining just before we left the park. It was about 8:20. We continued to find a few deer as it got later, and again on our trip through town. I quit counting the ones in town because I felt like I was counting them same ones every night.
Today's Wildlife Count is:
deer - 55 (not including those in town)
turkeys - 6
elk - 34
antelope - 3
lots of buffalo
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