We were standing under the noses of the presidents, looking up.
A rubble pile sprawls under the iconic portraits. It was left when the mountain was blasted, drilled and carved away to create images of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.
"There are 450,000 tons of rock on the talus slope," said ranger Brian McMahon. He told my tour group that if the presidents were carved to their full height, they would stand more than 400 feet tall.
From the boardwalk at the foot of the mountain, I could see the magnitude of Rushmore. A mountain had literally been remade in the image of men.
The pile of stone at our feet left the impression that the carving had just happened. In midday sun, the bright white granite of the presidents' faces contrasted with the ruddy, weathered stone around them, the way the flesh of a freshly cut apple stands out from the color of its skin.
In his 30-minute talk, McMahon spelled out the basic story of Rushmore, and something about the accomplishments of each president.
A fixture in ads, political campaigns and movies, Mount Rushmore is easy to dismiss as a cliche — the quintessential mid-America tourist stop. This year, I stopped to consider it again with fresh eyes and came away with a much different, more complex picture.
The self-styled "Shrine of Democracy" is mainstream America's civic holy mountain. A record 2.9 million visitors made a pilgrimage to it last year.
Rushmore is also a herculean engineering accomplishment. It's a fitting symbol of American ambition, and the sculptor knew it: "American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life," said Gutzon Borglum.
For all the superlatives, Rushmore's saga also has its troubling plot twists. The whole messy story of its making is also achingly American.
To start with, there's the fact that Rushmore honors four white guys by blasting apart a mountain in the middle of Indian country.
Then there's Borglum's ties to the Ku Klux Klan. He befriended Klan leaders and advocated their causes during the years he spent working on the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Furthermore, not everyone is enamored of the gantlet of tourist traps and screaming billboards on all roads leading to Mount Rushmore — from Holy Terror Mini Golf to Bear Country, USA.
"Everyone wants America to be a simple story, without shades of irony," author John Taliaferro said in an interview. Taliaferro, a former editor at Newsweek, wrote "Great White Fathers," a book on Mount Rushmore that was published earlier this year, and which documents Borglum's Klan connection. "The truth is more complicated than that . . . if Mount Rushmore is supposed to be the sum of what America means, then the complications are part of that."
Gutzon Borglum was the son of a Danish Mormon immigrant who was in a polygamous marriage with two sisters. Borglum was born in Idaho in 1867 to the younger sister and grew up in Fremont, Neb.
In his late teens, he struck out for California to become an artist. He studied painting and at 22 married a well-connected fellow artist who was 18 years his senior. They went to Paris together, and there he became a student and friend of Auguste Rodin, the famous sculptor of "The Thinker."
Borglum was fascinated by the idea of "great men" who shape history, and while he did sculpt some amazingly beautiful female portraits and nudes, he favored presidents and generals. An outrageous character, he managed to meet and befriend many of the famous and powerful people of America in the early 1900s.
"Borglum was a Zelig," said author Taliaferro, referring to a Woody Allen movie. "He was in the corner of every photo of every important moment of the age."
Borglum was friends with the Wright brothers, for example. He hobnobbed with Teddy Roosevelt and campaigned for the Bull Moose Party. He completed a redesign of the torch on the Statue of Liberty. He made national news and created controversy when he charged that there was an industrial conspiracy during World War I.
All the while he was making sculpture and trying to find a venue that would raise his work to the kind of national audience that fine art seldom sees.
His first effort to carve on a monumental scale was in Georgia, on Stone Mountain, beginning in 1915. He worked on the project on and off for 10 years.
Stone Mountain was plagued by a lack of funds and constant bickering, most of it initiated by Borglum, who had no patience for those who didn't kowtow to his genius or his often-unreasonable demands.
By 1924, he had finished a gargantuan relief of Robert E. Lee on horseback in the granite face of the mountain. Not long afterward, he was fired amid a flurry of accusations, and, according to Borglum's version of the story, he was chased out of Georgia in a hail of gunfire.
Not long afterward, the owners of Stone Mountain blasted Borglum's Lee off the mountainside. The project was eventually redesigned and completed by a different sculptor.
But by then, Borglum had already secured a foothold in a new project:
Mount Rushmore.
The idea for Mount Rushmore came from South Dakota's state historian at the time, Doane Robinson, who liked the Stone Mountain project. He thought that in South Dakota, the Needles — famous pinnacles of stone in the Black Hills — could be the canvas for a similar project.
He envisioned monumental portraits of Western heroes such as Lewis and Clark and Sitting Bull and thought it would be a great way to bring tourists to the state. (He was right about that.)
Robinson invited Borglum to check out the Black Hills. The sculptor accepted the challenge. He convinced the South Dakotans that four presidents — chosen to represent specific aspects of the greatness of the United States — would be the most appropriate subjects for his masterpiece.
Borglum started in 1927 and worked on the mountain until he died in 1940. There were many roadblocks along the way, including funding, political squabbles and Borglum's tendency to alienate friends and supporters with unreasonable tirades.
But he was also tenacious, managing to convince others that his dream of a mountain carved into great men could become a reality.
As an engineer and artist, Borglum was an innovator. He designed the tools and systems necessary to transfer the exact image of his studio model onto the mountain. He learned how to use dynamite to block out the shape. He created a system of block-and-tackle pulleys that suspended workers on the side of the mountain with jackhammers to do the finer work. His attention to detail and safety was remarkable — not one man was killed on the project.
Rushmore was far from finished when Borglum died. His studio is now open to the public, and you can see the nearly 20-foot-tall model that the mountain was supposed to look like. It shows the presidents from the waist up. Thomas Jefferson's left hand rests on George Washington's arm, as if he's about to ask him a question. Abraham Lincoln is holding his collar, in a thoughtful moment.
But World War II was under way, and the nation's attention and energy turned away from Borglum's grand vision.
Even unfinished, Rushmore was the largest work of public sculpture carried out since the great civilizations of the past. Borglum had paid a fitting tribute to the emerging empire of the age.
Mount Rushmore's renovated setting is designed to keep visitors around long enough to develop a deeper appreciation of the monument and its story.
While admission to the park is free, all cars must pay $8 to enter a mountain-size, multi-level parking garage, which is out of view once you enter the pavilion in front of the monument.
There's an expanded museum, Borglum's studio, new cafeteria space and a gigantic gift shop. If somebody can put the image of Mount Rushmore on it, you can buy it there. I picked up a hand-painted glass Christmas ornament made in China.
A 2,000-seat amphitheater faces the presidents, and each night there's a lighting ceremony, with a slickly produced movie and patriotic music.
The night I was there, the seats were full and so were the aisles. It was a pristine summer evening, and as the sun settled into the west, the sky above Mount Rushmore glowed with shreds of pink cloud that would shame Maxfield Parish. A three-quarter moon smiled down from above.
One of Borglum's artistic innovations is the way he carved the eyes, which are 11 feet wide. Large, rectangular bars of granite protrude from the hollowed out bowls that represent the iris. The bars throw shadows across the irises, suggesting the spark of life.
Washington, straight-shouldered and regal, looked resolved but kind. Jefferson, his face tilted back, smiled ever so slightly, as if he were considering something with sly amusement. Theodore Roosevelt looked a bit sad and burdened, pinched into a recess behind the others. Lincoln looked as he does in photos — wise, compassionate but also of wry good humor.
They looked like real people do — creatures of emotions and moods, ever-changing, enigmatic.
It was the effect of a real work of art: As the audience looked at the mountain, the mountain looked back at us.