CUSTER STATE PARK, S.D. — From the fire tower here, the visages of four American presidents on Mount Rushmore, 20 miles north, look about the size of those on nickels and pennies.
A bit to the west, you can see the face of the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse emerging from another granite cliff, and 7,242-foot Harney Peak, where American Indian holy men sought visions to give them direction.
The Black Hills surround the sights, man-made and natural, like a wagon train circled for the night. Beyond them in all directions stretch the Great Plains, where buffalo grazed and battles for America's destiny were waged.
After that, there's just sky.
Some places are better than history books for telling our stories. The Black Hills of South Dakota, out of the way and undiscovered by the trendy set, would be such a place even if an obsessed Danish American sculptor hadn't carved the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln on the southeast-facing flank of Mount Rushmore.
Appropriately, perhaps, it takes a little effort to get to the Black Hills. Unless you drive to South Dakota, you have to fly to Rapid City, a town of about 61,000 that doesn't seem to have a building taller than 10 stories except for grain elevators. Its motels and attractions — petting zoos, go-cart tracks and the like — look as though they haven't changed since the '50s, reassuring to those of us who recall bygone family vacations in old-fashioned touristy places like this.
I thought there was something vaguely kitschy about the massive sculpture. How could anyone improve on the sheer granite cliffs of the Black Hills, shot through with quartz and glinting with mica?
I was wrong on all counts. Visitors are bound to be impressed, no matter how they come upon Mount Rushmore — whether on the grand ceremonial approach provided by U.S. 16A from the ticky-tacky tourist town of Keystone; or from behind, where a hairpin bend in South Dakota 244 presents a surprise profile of George Washington; or from the south on dauntlessly switchbacking Iron Mountain Road, which has tunnels that perfectly frame the cliff carving in the distance.
Close up, Mount Rushmore National Memorial grounds don't look quite as they did in the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock movie "North by Northwest," thanks to a $56 million renovation completed in 1998. A paved walkway lined with the flags of the 56 U.S. states, districts, territories and commonwealths takes visitors from the parking garage toward the monument, passing a cafeteria and large gift store along the way. The walkway ends at a broad stone terrace directly overlooking an amphitheater where nightly presentations are held, ending with the illumination of the monument by high-powered quartz and halogen lamps.
Beyond it are ponderosa pines, 450,000 tons of rock blasted off the cliff during construction and now tumbled against the mountain's lower flank and, finally, the four presidents' faces.
They are silver in bright sunlight, at other times dappled by the shadows of clouds or all but obscured when the Black Hills are shrouded with fog. The visages are 60 feet high, eyes 11 feet wide, noses 20 feet tall, created on 5,724-foot Mount Rushmore in about 14 years, ending in 1941, by 400 workmen, sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln.
The four were meant to represent the founding, growth and preservation of the United States. Washington, to the left, is the most prominent; Jefferson is to his right as you face them, though he was moved there only when a fault was discovered in the rock on Washington's other side, where the Jefferson carving was started. Next comes Theodore Roosevelt. He was a friend of sculptor Borglum, who included the 26th president despite critics who said T.R. didn't belong in such august company. Bookending the monument on the far right is a bearded Abraham Lincoln, a shoo-in, though Borglum deliberated about whether to sculpt the author of the Gettysburg Address with facial hair.
Visitors spend their time snapping pictures or simply gazing at the monument from the terrace. Some venture down to the visitor center, dug into the hill that faces Mount Rushmore.
I walked the three-fifths-mile circular trail that winds through the forest past Borglum's high-ceilinged studio, which has his plaster model of the sculpture and one of the jackhammers used to carve it. The path yields to a series of steps and decks that take you to the lower edge of the talus slope below the monument, so close to the presidents that it seemed as though I could tickle them under their chins.
The most easterly upthrust of the Rocky Mountains, the Black Hills are an oval dome of billion-year-old granite that covers the southwestern corner of South Dakota like an island in the prairie. This place was sacred to the Sioux, the most powerful tribe in the West when white explorers and trappers arrived. George Armstrong Custer, already an experienced Indian-fighter when he led an expedition into the area in 1874, reported that the hills were full of gold "from the grass roots down."
These days, one of the things that makes the hill country precious is 73,000-acre Custer State Park, about 20 miles south of Keystone, which I liked even more than Mount Rushmore. It was founded in 1919 by U.S. Sen. Peter Norbeck of South Dakota, who also helped lay out Iron Mountain Road, which twists and turns to the park's eastern entrance, and the Needles Highway, another scenic byway in the park that loops around the bases of huge granite spires like yarn around a knitter's fingers.
Along these roads and the park's 18-mile wildlife drive, visitors encounter buffalo, deer, pronghorn antelope, elk, bighorn sheep, burros and wild turkeys but no bears, which were eradicated from the area around the turn of the last century.
Even without the bears, Custer State Park is a little Yellowstone, over which conservationist Teddy Roosevelt can look from Mount Rushmore with contentment.
About 10 miles west of Mount Rushmore, another monumental cliff carving is taking shape. It will depict the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse and is the work of sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who died in 1982 after carefully planning the monument but seeing little of it done. His wife, Ruth, and 10 children have continued on. Now a private foundation manages the monument, and a crew of eight workmen labors over it, including two Ziolkowskis. At the rate things are going, some say it could take 50 more years to finish.
Sioux Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote to Ziolkowski in 1939, asking the sculptor to give the Black Hills a carving of an American Indian hero to go along with those of the presidents.