Wyoming Adventure, Part II-b

Oops! Blogger went haywire and I lost the back side of this post! I will now try to re-create it in all it's eloquence! Haha! :)

Visiting Mount Rushmore - I took many photos here because like Devil's Tower and Crazy Horse before, I felt like if I didn't keep my eyes on those presidents in stone, they'd somehow disappear! What an awesome feat! The Visitors Center (nice and cool) shows a timeline of the work on the carving, the geological facts of the mountain, and other related facts. The National Park Service Mount Rushmore website, here, has all the information about the conception, the funding, the carving, and the completion of this symbol of the birth, growth, development, and preservation of the United States of America.

Me, Clare, Jenn, and David and the four presidents in stone.

Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln.

Also in the Visitors Center, there was a display of small quilts, part of the "Find Your Park" challenge for the 100th year celebration of the National Park Service on August 25, 2016. I liked this one of Rocky Mountain National Park beautifully rendered by Marilyn Remboldt of Lincoln, Nebraska.

We were all getting quite wilted and hungry, so before leaving the park, we went into the Memorial Team Ice Cream Station to sample the TJ's vanilla ice cream, based on Thomas Jefferson's original recipe brought to the United States in 1780. . . delicious!

We left Mount Rushmore and journeyed back to Gillette, stopping in Custer so that Jenn and Cassie could look in a tee shirt shop they'd spotted on the way up, of all things! Made it back to the CAM-PLEX in time to grab dinner at the new Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom and then we settled in to watch a movie ("London Has Fallen" - very bad!) with Dave and Jenn. Thursday would see us staying close to camp to watch Team Utah in Performances 8 and 9, 2nd Round. 

 

Ah yes! A frosty Lemon Shandy.

Bright and HOT for Performance 8 (2nd perf of the 2nd round).

Friday morning was grandson Ty's second, and final, run at a steer; he made a good, solid 5.95 second run. However, with his earlier run of 15.05 seconds, he would not be in the top 20 for the Short Go Saturday evening. Clare and I decided to pull up stakes and head for home via Cody, Wyoming. Since this part of the trip was quite different and I took many photos along the way, I will post it as our Wyoming Adventure, Part III!

Wearing red in honor of our troops.

More later.

               

Wyoming Adventure, Part II

Here is one of many coal mines outside Gillette. This country is rich in coal, oil and cattle; and, wind!
When we returned from our trip to Devil's Tower, we grabbed dinner and headed back to the arena for Performance 5 of the First Round. I took a photo of this precious little baby girl for Alternate 2 of Rinda's 2016 Summer Photo Scavenger Hunt since I am uncertain that I will ever find #17, twins, before the September 22 deadline.

I did post this on Instagram too.

Plans had been formulated with our son and daughter-in-law and another Utah rodeo couple to leave early Wednesday morning for Mount Rushmore; since we were within 150 miles of this renowned monument, we figured that we'd take the opportunity to see it. Not far from Rushmore is the Crazy Horse Memorial so we took in that too. We entered South Dakota and the Black Hills 10 miles out of Newcastle, Wyoming on Highway 16. This country is truly beautiful forest and it was a curvy but very pleasant drive to Custer and then on to the two monuments.

Crazy woman at Crazy Horse.

The sculptor's, Korczak Ziolkowski, vision. More information can be found here.

We watched the video presentation in the Visitor Center and came away from that quite impressed with the determined effort not only of the original visionaries of this memorial, but with the continued dream of the family and the organization they have built.

Ziolkowski's original generator used to power the drills he used to make the first holes. According to his narration in the video presentation, it was not terribly reliable and would "kaput" just as he had climbed the stairs to get to the top of his drilling site; hence, the sign out of the exhaust stack.

It is difficult to describe the size of this monument although the crane boom seen at the top of the hand (which is currently being carved) looks very tiny and is, in comparison to the face.

We journeyed on through the Black Hills National Forest to Mount Rushmore - I spotted so many gorgeous wildflowers along the way but stopped myself from asking Clare to stop so I could photograph them . . . it would've held up the caravan behind us! There were White Yarrow, Purple Prairie Clover, Blanket Flower, Black-eyed Susan, Sunflower, Wild Meadow Rose, Lupine, Aster, and Green-headed Coneflower among many others. What a feast for the eyes! 

Arrived at Mount Rushmore along with hundreds of other summer tourists and made our way to the viewing point:

The flags depict all 50 states of the United States of America and the dates each entered the Union are inscribed underneath.